Stalinism and The Dialectics of Saturn

Stalinism and the
Dialectics of Saturn
Stalinism and the
Dialectics of Saturn
Anticommunism,
Marxism, and the Fate
of the Soviet Union
Douglas Greene
Foreword by Harrison Fluss
‌‌‌‌‌L E X I N G T O N B O O K S
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Dedicated to Harrison Fluss, my dear friend
and comrade who inspired this book.
v
Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Saturn and His‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Children xix
Chapter One: Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue: The

Jewish-Bolshevik Contagion 1
Chapter Two: Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue: Big Brother 11
Chapter Three: Stalinism as a Bolt From the Blue: The Counter-
Enlightenment Project 27
Chapter Four: Stalinism as Historical Necessity: Rubashov and
Terror 93
Chapter Five: Stalinism as Historical Necessity: The Ambiguities of
Western Marxism 117
Chapter Six: From Proletarian Jacobinism to Stalinist Thermidor 205
Chapter Seven: Stalinism as Thermidor: Western Retreat and
Eastern Reconciliation 249
Chapter Eight: Escaping Fate 281
Appendix: Domenico Losurdo: A Critical Assessment of Stalin: The
History and Critique of a Black Legend 283
Bibliography 313
Index 339
About the Author 359
vii
Foreword
By Harrison Fluss
What does it mean to be born under the sign of Saturn? This is something
Susan Sontag explored in her essay on Walter Benjamin. In terms of the
zodiac, it doesn’t portend an easygoing fate, but forecasts a mood of doom,
gloom, and overall melancholic temperament. Such depression according to
Sontag has its metaphysical source in a neurotic fixation on the will. It is—as
Hegel might have diagnosed—a “beautiful soul” syndrome. For Sontag, this
personality type is fixated on the fragility of one’s own will. This results in
an overcompensation. “Convinced that the will is weak, the melancholic may
make extravagant efforts to develop it.”1
As for Benjamin himself, the writer linked his destiny to Saturn in his
book One-Way Street: “I came into the world under the sign of Saturn—the
star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.”2 Benjamin
was witness to so many betrayed revolutions and triumphs of fascism, and his
invocation of Saturn seems fitting for the “astrological” fate of Marxism in
the twentieth century. This cosmological-historical pattern is experienced as
so many tragedies, farces, false dawns, and drowned hopes. And for the Left
today, things seem worse than ever; impending climate change, the threat of
thermonuclear war, and the rise of neofascism check all the boxes for barba-
rism instead of socialism. If this “dialectic of Saturn” truly governs our fate,
the Left is made to act out its own psychodrama, where the abstract wish that
something be done replaces what really needs to be done. In the absence of
concrete material change, all focus is put on the pure, revolutionary “will,”
and this will, being abstract, could point in any number of directions—from
mystical quietism to revolutionary adventurism.
In Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Shakespeare’s
Hamlet falls under Saturn’s orbit as well. The planet’s pull over the Danish
prince steers him either toward morose contemplation or frenzied action. If
ix
x Foreword
Hamlet’s universe is one of stagnation and sluggishness, it is also marked

by Machiavellian intrigue, tyranny, and betrayal. The rightful king has been
murdered, royal authority usurped, and an illegitimate sovereign rules the
land. The court is hypocritically forced to pay deference to this tyrant, and
the prince is rendered politically impotent. He is aware of the injustice against
his family and the kingdom, but seems incapable of actively taking back
his throne.3
Benjamin wrote his critical study in 1928, and its discussion of bloody
farce and drama eerily anticipates the Stalinist atmosphere of the Moscow
Show Trials. It also captures how many Leftists dealt with Stalin in the
mode of Hamlet, that is to say, in either sad submission or blind hatred. To
paraphrase Spinoza, instead of a real effort to understand concrete material
circumstances, there was just so much crying and weeping. Of course, given
the brutality of Stalinism, such crying and weeping were inevitable. But from
this atmosphere of despair, nearly all materialist analysis of Stalin’s coun-
terrevolution was absent. Instead, we were left with either a Cold Warrior
anti-Communism or a sheepish, pro-Soviet apologetics. Stalinism was not
something to be rationally understood, but only to be feared as either evil
incarnate, or a quasi-mystical force demanding acquiescence.
This ideological despair usually comes packaged in a superficial analysis,
with the premise that Stalinism was the real essence of the October Revolution.
This is a pattern of argument common to pro-Stalinists and anti-communists
alike. As such, these responses are divided along the question of whether
Stalinism was a Satanic outcome of an already infernal process, or something
to be (fatalistically) embraced. The anti-communist perceives Stalinism and
Bolshevism in demonological terms, a maleficent will beyond comprehen-
sion. The Stalinist instead casts the conservative bureaucratization of the
Soviet Union as part of the iron laws of history. These opposed positions
come equipped with their own philosophies of history, the former voluntarist
and latter fatalist. Marx anticipated such undialectical positions in his preface
to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and Douglas Greene uses
Marx’s framework to understand various responses toward Stalin’s counter-
revolution. For the voluntarist, Stalin is akin to pure evil, a force of violence
that appears like “a bolt from the blue,” much as Victor Hugo saw Napoleon
III; for the fatalist or necessitarian position, Stalinism is simply our historical
destiny, akin to how Pierre-Joseph Proudhon prostrated himself before the
new Bonaparte’s Second Empire.4
Marx, on the other hand, was neither a fatalist nor a voluntarist, but a
determinist. Every event has some determinate cause, and our ability to act
meaningfully in the world comes down to how well we can map the various
causes and effects around us. To escape the fate of blind necessity, under-
standing historical laws and causes is crucial.5 Freedom, if it is to have any
Foreword xi
intelligible sense at all, is not mere contingency or caprice (not “free will”),
but is irreducibly causal. Freedom means insight; the more we know, the
more we can act effectively.
As Marx insisted against Wilhelm Weitling and other abstract moralists,
ignorance never helped anyone. And despite Mikhail Bakunin mocking Marx
for wanting to turn the worker into a theorist, the proletariat needs scientific
understanding if they want to escape the muck of history. Without such
understanding, artists and intellectuals like Hugo and Proudhon could only
hide behind mystical abstractions; they could curse history or submit to it,
but never really know it. Without the lens of class struggle and materialist
analysis, we can only appreciate events tragically, or as outside the power of
ordinary human beings. True, a historical materialist analysis might preach a
certain stoicism depending upon the circumstances; insurrection is not always
the order of the day, and it is only recently in human history, as Marx and
Engels demonstrated, that we can overcome class society. The capacity to
produce for “each according to their need” simply wasn’t available in antiq-
uity or feudalism, no matter how vile and unjust these systems were. There
have always been opportunities for anger and wrath against oppression, but
not always an opportunity to extinguish the sources of so much injustice as it
emanates from class society.
Marxist necessity is opposed to all forms of demonology, i.e., an obsession
with evil “will” over material causes. This includes the most popular takes
(from both liberal and conservative historians) on key modern revolutions.
For the bourgeois consensus, it was the bloodthirsty Robespierre who pursued
revolutionary terror for its own sake (Taine), or perhaps because of personal
insanity (Le Bon).6 This interpretation, of course, ignores the historical fact
that France was then suffering from both a civil war and the threat of foreign
invasion. The Terror was instituted as a national emergency measure to fight
counterrevolution and end aristocratic hegemony. Likewise, the bourgeois
historians see Stalin as personally evil and his regime as expressing the very
DNA of Bolshevism. This conveniently ignores how Russia suffered through
a horrendous civil war that depopulated its main city centers, starved the
country, and was subjected to imperialist and reactionary violence, resulting
in the bureaucratization of the revolution. In the liberal-conservative imagi-
nation, revolutions are like Saturn—that Lord of Time—doomed to consume
their children.
To moderates during the French Revolution, the whole event appeared
as merely the subjective excesses of certain radicals. The Girondist deputy
Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud invoked Saturn as a warning against such
extremism: “Citizens, we have reason to fear that the revolution, like Saturn,
will devour successively all its children, and only engender despotism and
the calamities which accompany it.” For more reactionary characters, like
xii Foreword
Jacques Mallet du Pan, this classical metaphor condemned the whole effort to
change society. In the year 1793, Mallet du Pan put it more succinctly: “Like
to Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” But what gave the phrase its
highest artistic rendering was Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death (1835).
There, as Danton is plagued with Hamlet-like indecision, he waxes poetic
with the same refrain: “The revolution is like Saturn: it eats its children.”7
Saturn is perhaps not just the lord of hellish temporalities but could also
be linked to Benjamin’s “Angel of History.” Benjamin introduces this divine
creature in his interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus. The
Angel does not see things in terms of mere deterministic cause and effect.
Instead, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The Angel, again like Hamlet,
“would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed.” But he cannot, since a storm is coming from “Paradise” itself,
blowing the Angel further into the distance. His back is turned away from the
future, and he can only see the “wreckage of the present” (which the duped
see as “progress”).8 The question arises that if this storm is blowing from
Paradise itself, is this a fatalistic necessity? As Benjamin’s friend Gershom
Scholem pointed out, Saturn for commentators of the Kabbalah plays a role
in the creation of a (fallen) universe in need of messianic repair.9 However,
when does this stop being merely metaphorical in Benjamin and start being
properly mystical?
Benjamin’s late thought displays a perfect coincidence of opposites
between voluntarism and a mystical fatalism. This coincidence does not point
toward a rational, i.e., dialectical, resolution, but to endless oscillations. For
Benjamin, we can break through the hellish continuum of Saturn’s rule, but
never based on a rational understanding of historical laws. It is actually a
matter of fate—waiting for the revolutionary moment which could come at
any time. This break has a messianic character, more akin to Nietzsche’s cri-
tique of German historicism than to Marx’s own historical materialism.10 The
more absolute the break from history, the more mystical and unintelligible the
revolution becomes.
When it comes to breaking with Stalinism however, the more Stalinism is
seen as demonic evil, the more imperialism starts to look like the messiah.
Undoubtedly, this was not Benjamin’s own intention. Nonetheless, this is a
possible outcome of his own premises; in lacking an objective materialist
standard of human flourishing, it is hard to pinpoint what counts as satanic
as opposed to messianic. Absolutely any political formation can be coded as
either sluggish, sclerotic history or as messianic break, or alternatively, as
infernal Antichrist. Who’s to say? And if Stalinism is indeed a providential
force, then shouldn’t Trotsky be seen as a Judas or Antichrist? Moralistic
accounts of Stalin call for a moralistic and mystical politics.
Foreword xiii
The “dialectic of Saturn” is thus a pseudo-dialectic since it does not point

to any genuine resolution, and what is needed is not Benjamin’s astrology, but
Marxist astronomy. While Doug Greene sees the dialectic of Saturn as an ide-
ology of Cold Warrior liberals, Western Marxists, and Stalinists themselves,
he does not think it is the real explanation of what happened in the Soviet
Union. The dialectic of Saturn can only give us a phenomenological angle of
how Stalinism emerged; it is a way to work through ideological appearances,
as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit tried to accomplish regarding the French
Revolution. Nevertheless, this phenomenology is no substitute for materialist
analysis. Here, Trotsky’s account of Stalinism remains the most comprehen-
sive and accurate, and it has weathered the test of time. While those who
broke with Trotsky saw the Soviet Union as a new class society—inaugurat-
ing a novel mode of production that went beyond capitalism or socialism—
this hypothesis was falsified in 1991 with the fall of the USSR. The USSR
was not some new, infernal entity, meant to take over the planet in an endless
dystopian night. Rather, in terms of the long Marxist calendar of history, it
was merely a hiccup.
The fall of the USSR confirmed what Trotsky had already said in The
Revolution Betrayed.11 He provided a real answer to the Russian Question:
that the nature of the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state, threat-
ening to totter back into capitalism. However, apart from the accuracy of his
diagnosis, the Stalinist caricature of Trotsky’s politics as abstract and roman-
ticist—that he was a mere dreamer—remains strong. Perhaps the greatest
service Doug Greene provides in the following pages is a robust defense of
Trotsky’s struggle as a real, genuine alternative to Stalinism; that the Platform
of the Opposition could have led the Soviet Union to a better and much more
democratic position.
As a determinist himself,12 Trotsky understood why the Stalinists defeated
the Left Opposition in the faction fights of the 1920s. This did not invali-
date his overall political line, since he knew that the Soviet Union could not
remain a house divided against itself, as a degenerated workers’ state. The
contradiction of Stalinism can only resolve itself in one of two ways: either
with a political revolution restoring Soviet democracy, or a total restoration
of capitalism. Thus, with his theory of permanent revolution, the fall of the
USSR confirmed Trotsky posthumously. From the standpoint of historical
materialism—sooner or later—Trotsky would be right about the USSR, just
as sooner or later Marx will be right about capitalism. As Marxists, basing our
impressions on the contradictory nature of capitalism, we predict socialism
in the long run, since socialism is not a mere hiccup, but a real historical ten-
dency. When Leftists invoke Luxemburg’s slogan “socialism or barbarism,”
one hopes they do not think the likely outcome is a mere 50/50 split, which
would turn Luxemburg’s own politics into a Pascalian wager. Hedging one’s
xiv F
oreword
bets like this does not inspire confidence, but also goes against Marx’s scien-
tific analysis of where history is headed. Despite all the threats we face as a
species, the capitalist present is still pregnant with the socialist future.
Trotsky remained implacable against Stalinist counterrevolution and
imperialism because there remains a genuine alternative. But without care-
fully explaining and justifying what that alternative is, we are only left with
our indignation. As Marx put it, paraphrasing Spinoza, ignorance never
helped anyone.
NOTES
1. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, Picador, 126.

2. Quoted in Sontag, ibid., 111. This Saturnine emphasis on detour and delay fits
very well with the notion of fascism as the barbaric “delay” before socialism.
3. For Benjamin on the Saturnmensch, see Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German
Trauerspiel (translated by Howard Eiland), Harvard University Press, 161.
4. See Marx’s 1869 preface to the 18th Brumaire: https://www.marxists.org/archive
/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/preface htm.
5. For why Marxism is determinist without being fatalistic or “mechanically mate-
rialist” see Hal Draper’s discussion in “The ‘Inevitability’ of Socialism” from 1947:
https://www marxists.org/archive/draper/1947/12/inevitsoc.htm.
6. For a discussion of Taine and Le Bon’s views on revolution, see Domenico
Losurdo’s Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel, Haymarket Press, 202.
7. Vergniaud quoted in François M. Mignet, History of the French Revolu-
tion, from 1789 to 1814 (London: Saville and Edwards, Printers, 1856), 199. For
du Pan, see Considerations on the Nature of the French Revolution: And on the
Causes which Prolong Its Duration (1793), 90. Online at: https://archive.org/details
/considerationson00mall. Georg Büchner, “Danton’s Death,” “Leonce and Lena,”
and “Woyzeck,” trans. Victor Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20.
8. For an in-depth analysis of Walter Benjamin’s angel, see Michael Löwy’s Fire
Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (Verso, 2005).
9. Moshe Idel, Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism (Con-
tinuum, 2011).
10. Regarding Benjamin’s deeper affinities to Nietzsche, see James McFarland,
Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History
(Fordham, 2013).
11. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Dover, 2012).
12. From Trotsky’s discussions on the Transitional Program (1938): “It is very
often a petty bourgeois conception that we should have a free individuality. It is only
a fiction, an error. We are not free. We have no free will in the sense of metaphysical
philosophy. When I wish to drink a glass of beer I act as a free man but I don’t invent
the need for beer. That comes from my body. I am only the executor. But insofar as
I understand the needs of my body and can satisfy them consciously then I have the
Foreword xv
sensation of freedom, freedom through understanding the necessity. Here the correct
understanding of the necessity of my body is the only real freedom given to animals in
any question and man is an animal.” https://www marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/
tp/tpdiscuss.htm.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is not a solitary exercise. The final result with all its strengths
and weaknesses are ultimately the responsibility of the author, but the writing
process is a collective endeavor. I want to thank those friends, comrades, and
family who walked this road with me. I owe many debts of gratitude, not all
of which I can acknowledge here. First of all: Harrison and Sam Fluss were
not only great sources of ideas and encouragement, but are two of the finest
friends and communists that I know. A special thank-you to Matthew Strauss
and Wayne Rossi for helping me find needed articles.
The following comrades and friends have also been constant sources of
support. Forgive me if I miss anyone since there are so many of you: Amy
Banelis, Jeffrey Baker, Derek Bartholomew, Peter Bloom, Alex Coy, Kyle
Creasey, Eric Draitser, Jim Farmelant, Nathaniel Flakin, Jennifer Harvey,
Christopher Hill, Ben Hillin, John Kaye, Brian Kelly, Marc Luzietti, Donald
Parkinson, Chris Persampieri, James Rotten, Andrew Smith, Coco Smyth,
Shalon van Tine, Daniel Tutt, Devin Ward, Ben Williams, and Fanshen Wong.
To Ian Scott Horst, you are a true communist and friend. Also, all the other
comrades who’ve offered support in other ways, I hope we can reach that
better world together.
I owe a special debt to the following members of my family: my mother for
her tireless support. I hope both my late father and grandmother would have
liked the finished book. To my brother Danny, thank you for listening to me
talk about ideas on our long phone calls. My sister Lauren and the support of
your pets: Munchie, Bixby, and the mighty lion Socks. Without seeing those
loving animals every day, I might not have finished.
xvii
Introduction
Saturn and His‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Children
It is therefore ridiculous to say: Stalin makes “monstrous and unprov-

able” charges against Trotsky, therefore Trotsky is politically right and Stalin
politically wrong—which is essentially what the Trotskyites are saying. It is
equally absurd to declare: Stalin must be wrong or else he wouldn’t have to use
such “methods” against Trotsky. Let us recall the “methods” the Jacobins used
to suppress the Girondins and the Dantonists—and where is there a Marxist
today who will dare assert that Robespierre was politically wrong as against
them? The fact is our judgment cannot be based on the validity of the “crimi-
nal” charges and countercharges; ultimately, fundamentally, it must be based
on political considerations, on the political aims and programs that Stalin and
Trotsky each represent. Ultimately, fundamentally, it must depend on whether
we believe Stalin to be a Russian Robespierre sending his Brissot or Danton
to death so as to remove an obstacle in the way of revolutionary advance or a
Russian Tallien or Barere dispatching his Robespierre to the guillotine so as to
open the way for a Thermidorian reaction.
Jay Lovestone, “The Moscow Trial in Historical Perspective”1
For nearly a century, Stalinism has cast doubt on the emancipatory potential
of communism. Like the French Revolution before it, the Russian Revolution
ended in despotism, purges, and terror. This appeared to lend authority to
conservative claims that revolutions cannot achieve a society free of exploita-
tion and oppression but must inevitably devour their own. Or as the French
revolutionary Georges Danton said in Georg Büchner’s 1835 play, Danton’s
Death: “The revolution is like Saturn, it eats its children.”2
Indeed, the conservatives painted the two revolutions in a similar light: a
decrepit old regime is overthrown by fanatical revolutionaries, who, in turn,
xix
xx Introduction
become a new breed of oppressors. The stages go from radicalism to reaction

in quick succession: Jacobinism to Bonapartism in France, and Bolshevism
to Stalinism in Russia. In addition, the actors in 1789 and 1917 appear to be
cast in the same roles. The imbecile monarchs are played by Louis XVI and
Nicholas II; the good-natured moderates by Lafayette and Kerensky. Danton
and Trotsky are cast as the demagogic rabblerousers, and Robespierre and
Lenin are cast as the radical leaders. The terrorists are played by Saint-Just
and Dzerzhinsky; and finally, the dictators are played by Napoleon and Stalin.
Does this mean that the Dialectic of Saturn and a Stalinist ending is the
unavoidable fate of a communist revolution? How the question is answered
is not an antiquarian concern or mere academic exercise, but it will deter-
mine whether human emancipation remains possible. To untie the Gordian
knot of Stalinism, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte provides a
useful starting point. In this work, Karl Marx analyzes how Louis-Napoleon
Bonaparte became Emperor Napoleon III of France in 1851. In his pref-
ace, Marx notes the different views among contemporary observers about
how Napoleon III was able to rise to power. This passage is worth quoting
at length:
Of the works on the same subject written at approximately the same time as
mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le petit and Proudhon’s
Coup d’état.
Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the respon-
sible publisher of the coup d’état. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt
from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does
not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him
a personal power of initiative such as would be without parallel in world history.
Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d’état as the result of preced-
ing historical development. Unnoticeably, however, his historical construction
of the coup d’état becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into
the error of our so-called objective historians. In contrast to this, I demonstrate
how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relations that made
it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.3
Marx observed that there were two mutually opposed ways to explain
how a seeming nobody came to lead one of the most powerful countries in
Europe. The first, represented by Victor Hugo considered Napoleon III to be
a demonic figure who appeared out of nowhere like a bolt from the blue. By
contrast, adherents of the second view, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, cel-
ebrated Napoleon III as a savior on horseback, who was acting in accordance
with the will of history. Marx believes that both these camps share the same
underlying ahistorical fatalism that cannot explain either historical events
Introduction xxi
or Napoleon III’s role. Rather, Marx argues that only a historical materialist
approach can explain the objective and subjective processes that led to the
rise of a second-class hero.
This book uses Marx’s three-part approach of “bolt from the blue,” “his-
torical necessity,” and “historical materialism” as a road map to understand
Stalinism. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 focus on the “bolt from the blue” perspec-
tive. Chapter 1 discusses anti-communists such as Winston Churchill, Adolf
Hitler, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who see Stalinism and communism more
generally as a diabolical force with no social roots, but merely as a vicious
contagion that threatens to enslave humanity. Chapter 2 looks at a “left” ver-
sion of the “bolt from the blue,” namely the work of George Orwell, who con-
sidered Stalinism to be a malevolent manifestation of Big Brother. Chapter
3 analyzes the “bolt from the blue” that emerged at the start of the Cold War
where Stalinism was seen as a form of totalitarianism. This Cold War counter-
Enlightenment Project sought to locate the roots of Stalinist and communist
totalitarianism in Enlightenment rationalism and Jacobinism. The key figures
developing this approach include Jacob Talmon, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Leszek Kołakowski, François Furet, Ernst Nolte, Robert Conquest, Richard
Pipes, and Martin Malia. The culmination of the Cold War counter-Enlight-
enment is The Black Book of Communism.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the opposite camp of Communists and fellow
travelers who saw Stalinism as a form of “historical necessity.” Chapter 4
looks at the life and work of the ex-communist Arthur Koestler, whose novel
Darkness at Noon concluded that Stalinist historical necessity was a form of
totalitarian logic. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty offered
the most sophisticated response to Koestler with his defense of Stalinist
historical necessity as a form of Pascalian wager. Ultimately, both Koestler
and Merleau-Ponty rejected Stalinist historical necessity and concluded that
its logic inevitably ended in totalitarianism. Chapter 5 provides an overview
of the major figures of Western Marxism and their relationship to Stalinist
historical necessity. The figures discussed include Theodor Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse,
Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Eric Hobsbawm, Louis Althusser, and Jean-
Paul Sartre. The response of Western Marxists to Stalinism ranged from open
support to outright rejection, but ultimately all of them failed to understand or
effectively explain it. An appendix at the end of the book will review the work
of Domenico Losurdo, the most important contemporary Western Marxist
defender of Stalinism.
Chapter 6 looks at the “historical materialist” or the “Proletarian Jacobin”
approach to understanding Stalinism. An overview of Proletarian Jacobinism
during the course of the Russian Revolution is given with a particular focus
on Leon Trotsky. His alternative program to Stalinism in the 1920s will be
xxii Introduction
presented in detail. The chapter concludes with a consideration ofdebates

on Stalinism as a form of Thermidorian Reaction, which reaches its mature
form in Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. For Trotsky, Stalinism was a
form of bureaucratic rule over nationalized property relations, which were
originally meant to produce proletarian democracy. The governing ideology
of Stalinism was not international communism, but the narrow nationalist
outlook of “socialism in one country.” Chapter 7 goes into Victor Serge and
Isaac Deutscher, two figures who emerged from within the Trotskyist move-
ment, but rejected Trotsky’s position on Stalinism. Victor Serge is a case of
“Western retreat” since he moves toward Western social democracy and Cold
War anti-communism. By contrast, Isaac Deutscher represents a position of
“eastern reconciliation,” since he identifies Stalinism as a force of historical
necessity but still hopes for democratic reform in the USSR. In the end, both
men found themselves far away from Trotsky’s revolutionary Marxism with
their adaptations to the West and East respectfully.
Finally, chapter 8 concludes this book by arguing that the camps of “bolt
from the blue” and “historical necessity” are ultimately identical in their
respective conclusions. These two explanations—whatever their other points
of contention—both have a fatalistic view of history and agree that Stalinism
is inevitable and there is no alternative to it. However, the historical material-
ist position does not consider Stalinism in the framework of either damna-
tion or salvation, but as a force engendered by material circumstances and
the class struggle. It was Leon Trotsky who successfully provided his own
Eighteenth Brumaire to understand that the nature of Stalinism was not rooted
in a Dialectic of Saturn.
The dialectics of Saturn is not just about understanding the past, but look-
ing forward to the revolutions of the future. If we accept that all revolutions
are fated to devour their own children, then our chances for liberation become
impossible. If we know that there are alternatives to the dialectics of Saturn,
then the possibilities for communism remain open.
NOTES
1. Jay Lovestone, “The Moscow Trial in Historical Perspective [Feb. 1937],” Marx-
ists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lovestone/moscow-trials.pdf.
2. Georg Büchner, “Danton’s Death,” “Leonce and Lena,” and “Woyzeck,”‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ trans.
Victor Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20. The phrase was originally
coined by the royalist thinker Jacques Mallet du Pan in Considerations on the Nature
of the French Revolution (London, 1793), 90.
Introduction xxiii
3. “Preface to the Second Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”

in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 21, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975),
56–57. (henceforth MECW) Italics in the original.
Chapter One
Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue

The Jewish-Bolshevik Contagion
A. THE VIRUS
From nearly the moment that the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789, the
defenders of the ancien régime viewed revolution as a profoundly demonic
force that assaulted throne and altar. The monarchist thinker Joseph de
Maistre saw the demons of the French Revolution not simply in its mass
upheaval and terror, but in the philosophical program of the Enlightenment:
“From the fact that the action and reaction of opposing powers is always
equal, the greatest efforts of the goddess of Reason against Christianity
were made in France; the enemy attacked the citadel.”1 No longer was the
Enlightenment the province of elite salons, but now it took to the streets. The
sansculottes traded the Holy Trinity of Catholicism for the new revolutionary
‌‌
trinity of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌
After the defeat of Napoleon, in order to stop any future revolutionary
outbreaks, the Holy Alliance of Metternich attempted to forever enshrine
the power of kings. Yet the dangers of modernity took on new and sinister
forms with the industrial revolution. Capitalism created immense changes in
the economy and brought forth new volatile social forces such as the modern
working class: a class made of up of people with no property who were the
source of the massive wealth created by the industrial revolution. More and
more, radical workers took up the ideas of Jacobinism, socialism, and com-
munism. The French Revolution had shown the power of the oppressed to
mobilize themselves and fight for their demands. As Eric Hobsbawm noted:
“The French Revolution gave this new class confidence, the industrial revolu-
tion impressed on it the need for permanent mobilization.”2 The power of the
workers was most clearly on display in the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and in
the Paris Commune of 1871.
1
2 The Jewish-Bolshevik Contagion
Nineteenth-century conservatives and reactionaries increasingly demon-

ized proletarian revolution in biological and racial terms. Modern medicine
with its discovery of bacteria and viruses made it possible to envision com-
munist ideology as a lethal disease that sapped the health of the nation. This
communist contagion with its anti-imperialism, egalitarianism, and interna-
tionalism took on the malevolent shape of the “Jew.” For the Right, the Jews,
seen as an alien outsider to the body politic, were considered vectors of a
revolutionary disease that needed to be stamped out.
The fear of the Jewish contagion was especially acute for the ruling classes
of czarist Russia. A rapidly growing revolutionary movement was bringing
workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia under its wing and threatening to
overturn the dynasty. Behind the revolutionaries, the Romanovs saw the Jews
acting as puppet masters. This image of a Jewish plot to control the world was
circulated by the czarist secret police in the infamous forgery Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. As upheaval grew in Russia, ultraroyalists such as the Black
Hundreds conducted deadly pogroms against the Jews to stop the spread of
the revolutionary virus.
Violence against the Jews reached terrifying new heights following
the 1917 revolution. For the White Armies fighting Lenin and the Soviet
Republic, anti-Semitism served as the ideological glue. They considered
it common sense that the Jews and communists were identical. During the
Russian Civil War, the Jews were again targeted, and upward of 200,000 were
massacred in pogroms. Following the defeat of the White Armies, émigrés
carried to the West their belief in the dangers of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” In the
chaos of postwar Europe, this virulent anti-Semitism found many receptive
ears among emerging fascist ideologues.
On the counterrevolutionary Right, it was axiomatic that communism was
a destructive force caused by a subversive virus. There was no uniform posi-
tion on Judeo-Bolshevism on the Right with views ranging from a focus on
subversive Jews in the conservative mainstream (Churchill) to the genocidal
(Hitler) to a more subdued anti-Semitism (Solzhenitsyn). However, in no
sense can the “bolt from the blue” of Judeo-Bolshevism rationally explain
communism, Stalinism, or the Soviet Union. Rather, the principal usage of
this idea is meant to defend the existing socioeconomic order, racial suprem-
acy, and imperial domination.
B. WINSTON CHURCHILL
The British statesman Winston Churchill was one of the most prominent
figures who warned about the dangers of subversive Jews as the driving
force behind communism. During the Russian Civil War, Churchill was an
The Jewish-Bolshevik Contagion 3
outspoken advocate for Britain militarily aiding the White Armies to strangle
the Bolshevik baby in its cradle. He considered the Bolshevik Revolution to
be a plague that knew no boundaries or borders:
Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease. It is not a creed; it is a pestilence. It

presents all the characteristics of a pestilence. It breaks out with great sudden-
ness; it is violently contagious; it throws people into a frenzy of excitement;
it spreads with extraordinary rapidity; the mortality is terrible; so that after a
while, like other pestilences, the disease tends to wear itself out. The population
of the regions devastated by its first fury are left in a sort of stupor.3
Behind the Russian Revolution, Churchill saw the hidden hand of subversive
Jews, whom he believed had long organized other revolutionary movements
ranging from the Illuminati to the Spartacist League. As he said in 1920:
The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among
the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account
of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefa-
thers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This
movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt
to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary),
Rosa Luxembourg [sic] (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this
world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitu-
tion of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence,
and impossible equality, has been steadily growing . . . In the Soviet institutions
the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not
indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary
Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and
in some notable cases by Jewesses.4
While Churchill, condemned subversive Jews as the source behind commu-

nism, he praised non-subversive Jews who professed loyalty to their country
and ancestral faith:
First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world,
identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life, and, while
adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the
fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England
would say, “I am an Englishman practising the Jewish faith.” This is a worthy
conception, and useful in the highest degree.5
For Churchill, no one personified the archetype of the subversive Jew more
than Leon Trotsky: “Like the cancer bacillus he grew, he fed, he tortured, he
slew in fulfilment of his nature. . . . He was a Jew. He was still a Jew. Nothing
could get over that.”6 Churchill saw the leader of the Red Army as a diabolical
genius of revolution who combined within himself all the nefarious traits of
Machiavelli, Cleon, and Jack the Ripper.
Yet he believed that Trotsky’s universalist Bolshevism was a corruption
of his underlying Jewish nature: “Hard fortune when you have deserted your
family, repudiated your race, spat upon the religion of your fathers, and lapped
Jew and Gentile in a common malignity, to be baulked of so great a prize for
so narrow-minded a reason!”7 According to Churchill, Trotsky’s malignant
character stood in stark contrast to the admirable Jewish traits found in his
own bourgeois father: “His father—old Bronstein—died of typhus in 1920
at the age of 83. The triumphs of his son brought no comfort to this honest
hard-working and believing Jew. Persecuted by the Reds because he was a
bourgeois; by the Whites because he was Trotsky’s father, and deserted by his
son, he was left to sink or swim in the Russian deluge, and swam on stead-
fastly to the end. What else was there for him to do?”8
In the battle against communism, Churchill viewed fascists as
comrades in arms. He considered fascism to be a necessary response by
the healthy antibodies of the nation against subversive elements. In 1927,
Churchill expressed admiration for the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and
his Blackshirts for successfully defeating Bolshevism:
If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with

you in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of
Leninism—[Italy] has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison.
Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protec-
tion against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.9
Due to his hatred for subversive Jews, Churchill welcomed the Stalinist
purges of the 1930s. He saw the Moscow Trials as a reassertion of Russian
nationalism and the curbing of internationalists who were hell-bent on
world revolution: “Clearly Soviet Russia has moved decidedly away from
Communism. This is a lurch to the Right. The theme of a world revolution
which animated the Trotskyists is cracked if not broken . . . Stalin has now
come to represent Russian nationalism in somewhat threadbare Communist
trappings.”10
Churchill freely admitted that he did not understand the Soviet Union. He
considered it impenetrable: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an
enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”11 For Churchill, the key to unlocking the
enigma of communism was understanding its character as a subversive and
internationalist virus.
C. ADOLF HITLER
The idea of “Judeo-Bolshevism” found fertile ground in a Weimar Germany

torn between the conflicting forces of revolution and counterrevolution.
Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialists, believed that the Jews
were responsible for the loss of the war, the overthrow of the Kaiser, and
the Spartacist uprising. Hitler viewed the Jews as a virus who threatened the
national hygiene: “[The Jew] is and remains a parasite, a sponger who, like
a pernicious bacillus, spreads over wider and wider areas according as some
favourable area attracts him. The effect produced by his presence is also like
that of the vampire; for wherever he establishes himself the people who grant
him hospitality are bound to be bled to death sooner or later.”12
Hitler considered Marxism to be an especially pernicious Jewish creation
due to its democratic and universal character, which “repudiates the aristo-
cratic principle of Nature and substitutes for it the eternal privilege of force
and energy, numerical mass and its dead weight.”13 Hitler believed that the
Russian Revolution was orchestrated by Jews, who now ruled from the
Kremlin. As he said in November 1941 with the Wehrmacht deep inside the
Soviet Union: “Understandably, the power which would one day confront us
is most clearly ruled by this Jewish spirit: the Soviet Union. It happens to be
the greatest servant of Jewry. That made . . . the USSR the supreme enemy of
National Socialism.”14 The only cure for the Jewish-Bolshevik contagion, in
Hitler’s mind, was for the German volk to fight them to the death.
This meant that Hitler conceived of war against the Soviet Union as
necessary to destroy the Jews and save Germany. In the planning stages of
Operation Barbarossa, Hitler told his generals that this would be a racial
struggle where no quarter would be shown:
Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a

social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for our future. We must
forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no com-
rade before or after the battle. This is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp
this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to
fight the Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.15
For Hitler, the destruction of Jews and Bolsheviks was practically the same
thing. If Germany succeeded in its war of annihilation against the Soviet
Union, the mass murder and genocide of the Jews would be the guaran-
teed outcome.
D. ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will be discussed at length else-

where, but for now his views on the Jews and communism will be highlighted.
Compared to Hitler, Solzhenitsyn was far more restrained and “moderate” in
his anti-Semitism. However, anti-Semitism is a running motif in his work and
undergirds his anti-communism.
Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism is easy to find. In The Gulag Archipelago,
he highlights the Jewish administrators of the prison camps. In the second
volume, photographs are included of the following six figures: Aron Solts,
Naftaly Frenkel, Yakov Rappoport, Matvei Berman, Lazar Kogan, and
Genrikh Yagoda. Perhaps it was only a coincidence that he picked out six
Jews for pictures? Years later, Solzhenitsyn claimed that Jewish prisoners had
an easier time in the gulag compared to Christian inmates: “If I would care
to generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews in the camps was especially
hard, I could, and would not face reproach for an unjust national generalisa-
tion. But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose
experience I saw—their life was softer than that of others.”16
Elsewhere in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was open about his
sympathy for anti-Semites. He says that the defeat of the pogromist White
Armies and their emigration to the West meant Russia lost a “great spiritual
world.”17 Later, Solzhenitsyn is practically regretful that Hitler missed an
opportunity to effectively make use of the collaborationist forces of Andrey
Vlasov and his Russian Liberation Army to create a truly popular movement
to free Russia from Bolshevik slavery: “Hitler was unable to understand the
historical fact that the opportunity to overthrow a Communist regime can
come only from a popular movement, from an uprising of the long-suffering
population. But Hitler was more afraid of such a Russia and such a victory
than of a defeat.”18
When it comes to the Russian Revolution itself, Solzhenitsyn considers
it akin to a foreign invasion and occupation. The invaders, naturally, are the
Jews. In Lenin in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn views Lenin as surrounded by Jewish
émigrés such as the devious Alexander Parvus. According to Solzhenitsyn,
Parvus was in the pay of the German General Staff, which was using Lenin
as an instrument to destroy Russia: “‘To make a revolution takes a lot of
money,’ Parvus insisted, his friendly shoulder pressing against Lenin. ‘But
to hold on to power when you get there will take even more.’ An odd way
of putting it, but strikingly true.”19 Solzhenitsyn does not consider Lenin as
a passive victim of these conspirators, but someone who was instinctively
susceptible to their influence due to his Jewish blood: “Why was he born in
that uncouth country? Just because a quarter of his blood was Russian, fate
had hitched him to the ramshackle Russian rattletrap. A quarter of his blood,
but nothing in his character, his will, his inclination made him kin to that
slovenly, slapdash, eternally drunken country. Lenin knew of nothing more
revolting than backslapping Russian hearties, tearful tavern penitents, self-
styled geniuses bewailing their ruined lives. Lenin was a bowstring, or an
arrow from the bow.”20 It was only natural to Solzhenitsyn that revolutionary
cosmopolitans tainted by Jewish blood wanted to destroy the Russian society
they were alienated from.
Another instance of Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism can be found in Two
Hundred Years Together (2001), a history of Jews in the Russian empire
and the Soviet Union. In this work, Solzhenitsyn states that the Jews did not
organize the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. However, they must bear respon-
sibility for these revolutions because they were led by Jewish renegades.
Solzhenitsyn is clever enough to maintain “balance” and to put in just enough
caveats to provide plausible deniability for his anti-Semitism. For example,
he says that Russians must also answer for their renegades as well: “Just as
we Russians must answer—for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist
peasants, for those crazed revolutionary soldiers, for those savage sailors.”21
When it comes to renegade Jews, however, he is unforgiving. Solzhenitsyn
says that the Bolshevik Party provided cohesion and coordination for their
subversion of Russia. In particular, Solzhenitsyn focuses on Trotsky as a
“leader and guiding genius” for organizing the Bolshevik seizure of power.22
Once in power, the Bolsheviks used Jews to staff the new terroristic apparatus
of the Soviet Republic: “following the October coup, the Bolsheviks were
only too happy to make use of the services of Jews in their administrative and
Party structures, motivated once again not by feelings of solidarity with Jews
but by the benefits received from their talents, their intelligence, and their
alienation from the Russian populace.”23
While the evidence of Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism is abundant, he pub-
licly denied it and even expressed fondness for Jews on occasion. Many of
his admirers, who included Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest, and Elie Wiesel,
vociferously rejected the idea that Solzhenitsyn was an anti-Semite in any
way. A fellow anti-communist, Richard Pipes, admitted that Solzhenitsyn was
only anti-Semitic in a “Russian way,” as opposed to a fascist way:
Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn’s case, it’s
not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He’s certainly not a racist; the ques-
tion is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to
Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite.
Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right’s view
of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of Jews.24
Solzhenitsyn speaks with more refinement than the coarse Black Hundreds.
He is a careful writer who knows how to speak in code. The American
neo-Nazi David Duke decoded Solzhenitsyn’s “spiritual” anti-Semitism as
no different from racial anti-Semitism. According to Duke, Solzhenitsyn
was simply telling “the truth about the Jewish supremacist role in the cre-
ation, execution and maintenance of world Communism, and the ‘Russian’
Revolution.”25
Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn comes out of a tradition of far-right anti-Semitism
that uses a particular method of argumentation by pointing out the number of
non-Russians and Jews in the Bolshevik Party and Soviet government. All of
this supposedly proves that the revolution was alien to Russia. For those in
Solzhenitsyn’s chosen audience, it did not take much effort to discern that he
was blaming the Jews for communism.
NOTES
1. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1995), 21.
2. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books,
1996), 209.
3. Winston Churchill, Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quota-
tions, ed. Richard M. Langworth (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 381.
4. Winston Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” Illustrated Sunday Her-
ald (London), February 8, 1920, 5. In contrast to subversive Jews, Churchill consid-
ered Zionists to be a pro-imperialist force and supported their claims in Palestine:
“from every point of view, [it would] be beneficial, and would be especially in har-
mony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” Ibid. There are opposed camps
on how Churchill viewed Judaism. For the position that he was a philo-Semite, see
Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 2008). A recent work on Churchill by Pakistani leftist Tariq Ali
argues that he was an anti-Semite; see Tariq Ali, Winston Churchill: His Times, His
Crimes (New York: Verso Books, 2022).
5. Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism.”
6. Winston Churchill, “When Churchill Sized Up Trotsky,” Intercollegiate Studies
Institute. https://isi.org/modern-age/when-churchill-sized-up-trotsky/.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939
(London: Heinemann, 1977), 226. Elsewhere Churchill said the following about
Mussolini: “Moreover, in the conflict between Fascism and Bolshevism there was
no doubt where my sympathies and convictions lay.” See Winston Churchill, Their
Finest Hour (New York: RosettaBooks, 2002), 155; At one point, Hitler was some-
one Churchill praised as a “vital force” in Germany. See: Winston Churchill, “The
Truth About Hitler,” International Churchill Society. https://winstonchurchill.org

/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-156/the-truth-about-hitler-1935-hitler-and-his
-choice-1937/.
10. Winston Churchill, Step by Step, 1936–1939 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1939), 45 and 53.
11. Churchill 2008, 145.
12. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 238.
13. Ibid., 61.
14. Adolf Hitler, The Complete Hitler, ed. Max Domarus (Würzburg:
Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1990), 2505.
15. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945 Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2000b), 356. See also Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The
Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 127;
Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 2011), 35–36, 42, 44, and 66–67; Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk,
1941–1944: His Private Conversations (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 332 and
657; Enzo Traverso, Understanding Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003);
Peter Ross Range, 1924: The Year That Made Hitler (New York: Back Bay Books,
2016), 214–38.
16. Quoted in Nick Walsh, “Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution,” The
Guardian, January 25, 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/25/russia
.books; see pictures in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956:
An Experiment in Literary Investigation Volume II (New York: Harper & Row Pub-
lishers, 1974b), 79.
17. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment
in Literary Investigation (New York: Vintage Books, 2018b), 110.
18. Ibid., 102–3. Italics in the original. From a heterodox Trotskyist position, Tony
Cliff had misguided ideas that Vlasov’s forces represented an anti-Stalinist socialist
movement in embryo: “This deduction of the probable programme of the anti-Stalinist
opposition from the objective data of bureaucratic state capitalism is clearly supported
by the actual programmes of two organised anti-Stalinist movements which appeared
during the World War II—the Vlassov movement and the Ukrainian Resurgent Army
(UPA).” See Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974),
261–62.
19. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zürich (London: The Bodley Head,
1975b), 126.
20. Ibid., 89–90.
21. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Two Hundred Years Together” in The Solzhenitsyn
Reader: New and Essential Writings 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Dan-
iel J. Mahoney (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006), 505.
22. Ibid., 500.
23. Ibid., 504.
24. Quoted in Richard Grenier, “Solzhenitsyn and Anti-semitism: A New Debate,”
The New York Times, November 13, 1985. https://www nytimes.com/1985/11/13/
books/solzhenitsyn-and-anti-semitism-a-new-debate.html.
25. David Duke, The Secret Behind Communism (Free Speech Press, 2013), 15.
For more on Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism see Paul Flewers, “Solzhenitsyn: False
Prophet,” Weekly Worker, March 9, 2008. https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/735/
solzhenitsyn-false-prophet/.
‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌C hapter Two
Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue

Big Brother‌‌
The “bolt from the blue” understanding of Stalinism is not only found on the
far right but has its “left-wing” proponents as well. The most well-known
figure in this camp was the British writer, George Orwell. He identified
Stalinism (and communism) not as a plague, but a malevolent “Big Brother.”
Orwell believed that the roots of totalitarianism could be found in a natural
lust for power and cruelty inherent in human nature. Ultimately, Orwell’s
understanding of Stalinism was superficial and emotional since he lacked any
theoretical guide to grasp its inner workings.‌‌‌‌‌‌
Orwell’s disdain for theory can be traced back to his first announcement
that he was a socialist in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). This work was
based on Orwell’s firsthand experience observing working-class life in
Northern England at the height of the Great Depression. Wigan Pier’s moving
prose about the impoverished existence of workers recalls Friedrich Engels’s
The Condition of the Working Class in England, written nearly a century
prior. However, Engels had a theoretical frame of mind that saw beneath the
surface and understood capitalism’s laws of motion and the material necessity
for socialism. Orwell possessed none of that. The publisher of Wigan Pier,
Victor Gollancz, noted this theoretical weakness in the book’s foreword: “It is
indeed significant that so far as I can remember (he must forgive me if I am
mistaken), Mr Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism; nor
does he explain how the oppressors oppress, nor even what he understands
by ‘liberty’ and ‘justice.’”1
Gollancz was correct. Orwell only saw socialism as a sentimental idea that
meant justice and common decency. He did not consider Marxism or theory
of any sort to be important to working-class struggles. For Orwell, workers
instinctively understood the larger meaning of socialism and were more con-
cerned with bread-and-butter issues:
11
12 Chapter Two
The working-class Socialist, like the working-class Catholic, is weak on doc-

trine and can hardly open his mouth without uttering a heresy, but he has the
heart of the matter in him. He does grasp the central fact that Socialism means
the overthrow of tyranny, and the “Marseillaise,” if it were translated for his
benefit, would appeal to him more deeply than any learned treatise on dialecti-
cal materialism.2
This is not to say that workers could simply create socialism out of thin air.
Orwell does believe in the need for a working-class political party. He argues
that a party to the left of both Labour and the Communists is needed. In fact,
Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party in 1938. However, Orwell had
curious ideas on the role of a working-class party. Since workers already
knew what they were fighting for, then anything ideological or theoretical
was unnecessary: “It will have to be a party with genuinely revolutionary
intentions, and it will have to be numerically strong enough to act. We can
only get it if we offer an objective which fairly ordinary people will recognize
as desirable. Beyond all else, therefore, we need intelligent propaganda. Less
about ‘class consciousness,’ ‘expropriation of the expropriators,’ ‘bourgeois
ideology,’ and ‘proletarian solidarity,’ not to mention the sacred sisters, thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis; and more about justice, liberty, and the plight of the
unemployed.” 3
Orwell is also unclear on who is supposed to lead his imagined prole-
tarian party. He views middle-class intellectuals as elitist cranks who are
helplessly out of touch with workers. Yet Orwell says that the party should
be led by those with “better brains and more common decency.”4 Does this
mean organic intellectuals from the working class in the Gramscian sense?
Or something else? Orwell never quite explains who were the “better brains”
he hoped to attract.
Moreover, Orwell’s romanticism is replete with his antipathy toward ideas
of progress and industrialization. He believed that industry would end up
making people effeminate, dependent, uncreative, and degenerate: “In tying
yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of
softness. . . . The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the
human need for effort and creation.”5 Orwell saw industrialization leading not
necessarily to socialism, but toward a collectivist society resembling fascism:
“Pace the economists, it is quite easy to imagine a world-society, economi-
cally collectivist—that is, with the profit principle eliminated–but with all
political, military, and educational power in the hands of a small caste of rul-
ers and their bravos. That or something like it is the objective of Fascism.”6
Orwell believed that socialists needed to stop this outcome from becoming
a reality. This thinking would prove to be one of the major elements of his
understanding of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Big Brother 13
When Wigan Pier was published in March 1937, Orwell had already left
England four months earlier for Spain. For him, it was necessary to fight fas-
cism with arms in hand. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War would
prove to be a watershed moment in his political development. In Barcelona,
he witnessed the working class not as passive victims, but as a revolutionary
class who were transforming society: “It was the first time that I had ever
been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. . . . There was
much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I
recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”7
What Orwell found in Republican Spain was that there were vastly dif-
ferent ideas on how to fight Franco. The Spanish Communist Party (PCE),
which was rising to prominence, argued that winning the war took prior-
ity. Ironically, considering his later anticommunism, Orwell supported the
Communist position: “The Communists had a definite practical policy. . . .
What clinched everything was that the Communists—so it seemed to me—
were getting on with the war while we and the Anarchists were standing still.”8
In opposition to the Communists were the anarchists and the semi-Trotskyist
Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), who said that the revolu-
tion could not wait. Orwell himself ended up joining a POUM militia, but
disagreed heavily with their political and military program: “I spent much of
my time in the militia in bitterly criticizing the P.O.U.M. ‘line.’”9
Orwell’s earlier sympathies for the Communists slowly evaporated. He
observed that the Communists believed that winning the war required arms
from the Western democracies. Since the war began, Britain and France had
refused to support the Republic. In order to gain their support, the Communists
advocated rolling back the revolution and restoring bourgeois legality. This
was perfectly in line with Soviet interests since they also sought the sup-
port of Britain and France to contain fascism. Since the USSR was the only
country to arm the Loyalists, their voice carried weight in Spain. According
to Communist logic, this meant any organization that pursued a revolutionary
line was objectively treasonous. In the atmosphere created by the Moscow
Trials, the Communists perceived the POUM as their greatest enemies and
were determined to annihilate them. Orwell concluded that the Communists
and the USSR were in the camp of the counterrevolution: “There is very little
doubt that these [Soviet] terms were, in substance, ‘Prevent revolution or you
get no weapons,’ and that the first move against the revolutionary elements,
the expulsion of the P.O.U.M. from the Catalan Generalite, was done under
orders from the U.S.S.R.”10
In the first half of 1937, tensions grew inside the Republican camp between
the anarchists and POUM on one side, and the Communists and the bour-
geoisie on the other. In May, fighting erupted in Barcelona, the stronghold of
14 Chapter Two
revolutionary Spain, with a “civil war within the civil war.” Orwell fought
with the POUM in Barcelona against Republican efforts to restore order and
witnessed the final defeat of the Spanish revolution. In the aftermath, the
POUM was accused of launching a “fascist putsch,” and its outlawed mili-
tants were arrested en masse. The POUM’s leader Andrés Nin was tortured
and murdered by the Communist-run secret police.
It was in Barcelona that Orwell learned the power of propaganda.
Communist control of the press enabled them to successfully lie and portray
the POUM as a gang of “Trotskyite-fascist” wreckers: “I must say something
about the general charge that the P.O.U.M. was a secret Fascist organization
in the pay of Franco and Hitler. . . . What was noticeable from the start was
that no evidence was produced in support of this accusation; the thing was
simply asserted with an air of authority.”11 Here one sees the germs of the
totalitarian nature of information control found in the Ministry of Truth as it
appears in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
As a supporter of the POUM, Orwell naturally feared arrest. He managed
to escape the police dragnet and fled back to England. Almost immediately,
Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia, in which he told the truth about events
in Spain: “This Spain business has upset me so that I really can’t write about
anything else.”12 Since most of the British left was more sympathetic to the
Communist line on Spain, this meant Orwell had difficulties getting his
work published. He was furious at Communist influence in the publishing
houses and even condemned Gollancz and the Left Book Club as “part of the
Communism-racket.”13 Orwell did succeed in getting Homage published by
Secker & Warburg in 1938, but it proved to be a commercial flop.
While Homage to Catalonia is a moving mixture of war reporting and
anti-Stalinist polemic, it still bore all the sentimentalism and theoretical
limitations of Wigan Pier. Orwell was decidedly uninterested in Spanish
politics and the causes of the civil war itself. In the book, he apologizes to
the reader for the litany of political organizations he had to discuss, calling
them “a plague of initials.”14 Orwell was also cavalier about the facts and got
crucial details wrong about the civil war. For instance, he seemed completely
unaware that the POUM did not favor a militia system like the anarchists,
but was committed to creating a centralized red army. Even Orwell’s reason-
ing for fighting in Spain sounded like it was lifted directly from the text of
Wigan Pier:
I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it. I knew
there was a war on, but I had no notion what kind of a war. If you had asked
me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: “To fight against
Fascism,” and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have
answered: “Common decency.”15
Big Brother 15
The lasting impact of Orwell’s time in Spain cannot be underestimated when

it comes to his later political evolution. As he said years later: “The Spanish
war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where
I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been
written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic
socialism, as I understand it.”16 Having witnessed Stalinism up close, he was
enraged at how it crushed opposition and manipulated the truth.
Orwell had gone to Spain as a vague anti-fascist, but returned home with
sympathy for the revolutionary left. Now he criticized the POUM from the
left since they refused to complete the social revolution.17 He argued that the
whole idea of a popular front was a political abomination: “It is a combination
with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two
heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.”18 He believed that the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat could not successfully fight together against
fascism since their class interests were at odds. The bourgeoisie fought to
maintain capitalism while the proletariat demanded socialism. These mutu-
ally opposed positions meant that the bourgeoisie would betray the working
class. Therefore, Orwell said that the popular front placed communists on the
side of the capitalists as was amply proved in Spain:
When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular
jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty
shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point
to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolution-
aries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but
because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting
them there are . . . the Communists.19
Orwell’s newfound leftism did not mean he was now a Trotskyist. He saw the
roots of Stalinism lying in Bolshevism with its rejection of democracy. He
viewed the purges not as a unique feature of Stalinism, but something inherent
in Leninism. As he said in June 1940: “Similarly, such horrors as the Russian
purges never surprised me, because I had always felt that—not exactly that,
but something like that—was implicit in Bolshevik rule. I could feel it in their
literature.”20 When it came to Trotsky himself, Orwell condemned him as just
as guilty for the emergence of Stalin as anyone else in the Communist Party:
“Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as
much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that
as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a
much more interesting mind.”21
As war grew nearer in 1939, Orwell maintained his revolutionary, albeit
non-Marxist, position. He expected that the war would not be fought to
16 Chapter Two
eliminate fascism, but would actually install fascism in Britain: “Only two or
three years of it, and we may sink almost unresisting into some local variant
of austro-Fascism. And perhaps a year or two later, in reaction against this,
there will appear something we have never had in England yet—a real Fascist
movement.”22 Orwell’s antiwar position abruptly changed once World War II
began. Now he advocated rallying to the Union Jack and fighting a “People’s
War” against Nazism. This position can best be described as “revolutionary
patriotism,” which Orwell elaborated upon in his 1940 work, “My Country
Right or Left.”
Orwell’s revolutionary patriotism found its fullest expression in “The Lion
and the Unicorn,” published the following year. Here, he outlined his clear-
est ideas on the nature of a socialist program. Among the demands were the
nationalization of major industries, independence for India, and the reform of
the educational system. Yet Orwell’s socialism remained confused with both
a revolutionary and a conservative side. For example, he was opposed to the
aristocracy, but did not advocate abolishing the monarchy. At the same time,
Orwell argued that Britain should adopt the POUM’s position on revolution-
ary war: “The war and the revolution are inseparable. We cannot establish
anything that a Western nation would regard as Socialism without defeating
Hitler; on the hand we cannot defeat Hitler while we remain economically
and socially in the nineteenth century.”23 Orwell readily admitted the contra-
dictions of his vision of socialism: “It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logi-
cal. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the
Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge
in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s
cap-buttons. It will not set up any explicit class dictatorship.”24
Once the Soviet Union joined the war, Orwell grew ever more pessimistic
about the future. By now, he considered the USSR and Nazi Germany as
identical forms of totalitarianism. In a review of The Totalitarian Enemy by
the ex-communist Franz Borkenau, he said: “The two régimes, having started
from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system—a form
of oligarchical collectivism.”25 Orwell was particularly harsh when it came
to middle class intellectuals, whom he believed practically worshipped at the
altar of Stalin: “The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals
who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their
allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini. . . . It is important to notice that the cult of
power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their
own sakes.”26
Orwell saw a pressing need to fight this new intellectual orthodoxy sup-
porting the USSR. To that end, he took up his pen and wrote Animal Farm
(1943), retelling the history of the Russian Revolution as a satirical children’s
fable about farm animals. Animal Farm’s allegory is transparent with the
Big Brother 17
humans representing capitalists, the pigs as the Bolsheviks, the dogs as the
Soviet secret police, and the other animals representing the working class
and peasantry. The pigs Snowball and Napoleon are stand-ins for Trotsky
and Stalin respectively. At first, the farm animals rebel against a cruel human
farmer to create an egalitarian society. But then, the revolution leads to the
dictatorship of Napoleon. At the end, Orwell says the pigs are completely
indistinguishable from the humans they have overthrown:
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question,
now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked
from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already
it was impossible to say which was which.27
Due to the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, the publication of Animal
Farm was delayed until late 1945. Animal Farm was an instant commercial
and critical triumph upon its release. Arthur Koestler wrote to Orwell, hailing
the book: “Envious congratulations . . . This is a glorious and heart-breaking
allegory; it has the poesy of a fairytale and the precision of a chess prob-
lem. Reviewers will say that it ranks with Swift, and I shall agree with
them.”28 Needless to say, the success of Animal Farm far exceeded Orwell’s
expectations.
Yet the meaning of Animal Farm was ambiguous for many leftist critics.
Was it just a parable about Soviet totalitarianism or did the book represent
a wider denunciation of socialism? The American Dwight Macdonald asked
those very questions, leading Orwell to clarify his own position:
[Animal Farm is meant] as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean
it to have wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution
(violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people)
can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions are
only a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck
out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of
the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for them-
selves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down
then, it would have been all right . . . what I was trying to say was, “You can’t
have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a
benevolent dictatorship.”29
Judging by these remarks, Orwell still retained faith in his own idiosyncratic
version of English socialism. What he rejected were revolutions of a Jacobin
or Bolshevik type. Orwell considered totalitarianism to be implicit in the very
nature of revolutions of that sort. Whether the leaders were Trotsky, Stalin,
Robespierre, or Danton made no difference to him. Animal Farm’s moral is
18 Chapter Two
clear, if the workers undertake “that kind of revolution,” then it would inevi-
tably end in the creation of a new dictatorship.
Orwell’s thinking on the nature of totalitarianism was heavily influenced
by the work of the former Trotskyist turned reactionary James Burnham.
In The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham claimed that a collectivist
society ruled by a managerial class would replace capitalism. Looking at
social trends, Burnham argued that the Soviet Union was the country fur-
thest down the road to a managerial society, but that Nazi Germany and the
United States were not far behind. He even considered the New Deal to be a
symptom of the coming managerial society: “But no candid observer, friend
or enemy of the New Deal, can deny that in terms of economic, social, politi-
cal, ideological changes from traditional capitalism, the New Deal moves in
the same direction as Stalinism and Nazism. The New Deal is a phase of the
transition from capitalism to managerial society.”30 Burnham concluded that
a managerial revolution would fundamentally transform all aspects of society
into one of total domination: “Control over the instruments of production
will be exercised by the managers through their de facto control of the state
institutions—through the managers themselves occupying the key directing
positions in the ‘unlimited’ state which, in managerial society, will be a fused
political-economic apparatus.”31
Burnham elaborated on the nature of politics in The Machiavellians (1943).
He believed that politics can always be reduced to the pursuit of power: “The
primary subject-matter of political science is the struggle for social power
in its diverse open and concealed forms.”32 Ideology of any sort was simply
a shield that masked the striving for domination. While totalitarianism may
use democratic, fascist, or socialist trappings, it was simply about securing
the rule of the powerful. In Burnham’s conception, humanity was moving
towards a new totalitarian managerial society with an elite motivated by a
sheer Nietzschean will to power.
As World War II ended, Orwell believed that Burnham foresaw the division
of the world between the major powers. Following in Burnham’s footsteps,
Orwell predicted that these superpowers—Britain, USA, and USSR—would
be locked in a permanent state of war: “Already, quite visibly and more or
less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is splitting up into the two or
three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution.
One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see more or less
what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this
pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one
another, though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of
war.”33 In October 1945, Orwell said Burnham prophesized a “cold war” (in
one of the earliest uses of the term): “James Burnham’s theory has been much
Big Brother 19
discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—
that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure
that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and
in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.”34 It is during this
period that Orwell first developed one of the main themes of Nineteen Eighty-
Four, which was the division of the world into three superpowers locked
in an unending war. As he said in 1948: “What [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is
really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into
‘Zones of influence’ (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Teheran [sic]
Conference), & in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual
implications of totalitarianism.”35
In “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” published in May 1946, Orwell
dissented from Burnham’s ideas on a number of points. Of interest, he noted
Burnham possessed an adulation for power that Orwell had diagnosed in
fellow-traveling middle-class intellectuals: “It is important to bear in mind
what I said above: that Burnham’s theory is only a variant—an American
variant, and interesting because of its comprehensiveness—of the power
worship now so prevalent among intellectuals.”36 Orwell also disagreed with
Burnham’s contention that totalitarianism was inevitable and socialism was
impossible: “As for the claim that ‘human nature,’ or ‘inexorable laws’ of
this and that, make Socialism impossible, is simply a projection of the past
into the future. In effect, Burnham argues that because a society of free and
equal human beings has never existed, it never can exist. By the same argu-
ment one could have demonstrated the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900,
or of motor cars in 1850.”37 Interestingly, Orwell asks a question of Burnham
on the nature of power that applies even more to himself: “It is curious that
in all his talk about the struggle for power, Burnham never stops to ask why
people want power. He seems to assume that power hunger, although only
dominant in comparatively few people, is a natural instinct that does not have
to be explained, like the desire for food. He also assumes that the division
of society into classes serves the same purpose in all ages.”38 Despite a great
deal of convergence of his ideas with Burnham, Orwell still gambled on the
possibilities of English democratic socialism.
However, Orwell’s hope of a “third way” vanished as the Cold War with
the division between East and West set in. Now he saw the spread of Soviet
totalitarianism as a real danger. Orwell joined with Arthur Koestler in a cam-
paign of “psychological disarmament” by distributing anticommunist works
inside the Soviet Union. In addition, he was in contact with the International
Relief and Rescue Committee (IRRC) to help promote an American speaking
tour for Koestler.
These associations placed Orwell squarely in the anticommunist camp.
The IRRC had ties to the American State Department, and Koestler was
20 Chapter Two
positioning himself as the front man in the CIA’s cultural cold war.39 Finally
in 1949, Orwell gave a list of thirty-six names of suspected communist sym-
pathizers over to the Information Research Department (IRD), which was an
arm of British intelligence: “It isn’t a bad idea to have the people who are
probably unreliable listed.”40 As he told Gollancz in 1947, if war came, then
he was on the side of the United States:
I know that your position in recent years has been not very far from mine, but
I don’t know what it would be if, for instance, there is another seeming rap-
prochement between Russia and the West, which is a possible development in
the next few years. Or again in an actual war situation. I don’t, God knows, want
a war to break out, but if one were compelled to choose between Russia and
America—and I suppose that is the choice one might have to make—I would
always choose America.41
Orwell had chosen his side.

In the last years of his life, Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, which
was his most mature and comprehensive work on totalitarianism. Nineteen
Eighty-Four takes place in a dystopian world of the not-so-distant future
(1984) where three totalitarian states—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—are
locked in permanent conflict. The novel takes place wholly in Oceania, which
is ruled by the “Party” led by the unseen, but ever-present “Big Brother.” In
Oceania, all dissent is wiped out and total thought control is maintained by
the Thought Police who enforce the ideology of “Ingsoc” (English socialism).
The different influences used to construct the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four
are easily recognizable. The division of the world into three superstates is
merely Burnham’s Managerial Revolution portrayed in fictional form. Orwell
also borrows heavily from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s earlier dystopian novel We.
The analogies are equally transparent as well. Oceania corresponds to both
the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, while Big Brother is an amalgamation
of Stalin and Hitler. A permanent enemy modeled on Trotsky in the person of
Emmanuel Goldstein also appears.
The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, a low-level bureaucrat at the
“Ministry of Truth” who secretly opposes the party and hopes for rebellion
by the proles (Orwell’s name for the proletariat). Winston’s dissidence is
eventually discovered by the Party, and he is mentally tortured and broken.
Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with a “reformed” Winston proclaiming that he
now loves Big Brother.
The strength of Nineteen Eighty-Four lies in its vivid descriptions of
Oceania’s methods of control and domination. However, Orwell’s theoretical
weakness stands out since he cannot explain the emergence of the system or
how to combat it. For example, Winston Smith reads Emmanuel Goldstein’s
Big Brother 21
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism to answer those central

questions: “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.”42 Just as Winston
opens the chapter that explains “why,” he is arrested. During his interrogation
by the inner-party chief O’Brien, Winston is given the answers he sought:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the
good of others; we are interested solely in power. . . . We know that no one ever
seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is
an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of
persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power
is power. Now do you begin to understand me?43
No other explanation than sheer power can be given because Orwell is unable
to dig any deeper. He sees only the surface level of power, where it inflicts
savagery and degradation on human beings, becoming almost a sadomasoch-
istic aphrodisiac in the hands of totalitarian torturers. In the end, Orwell’s
answer to the why of totalitarianism is the same as Burnham: the goal of
power is power.
Orwell does not want to just throw up his arms in utter despair. At one
point, Winston expresses belief that the proles would lead a popular revolt:
“If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles. If there was hope, it must
lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses,
85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party
ever be generated.”44 Despite everything, the proles seem to hold onto their
basic humanity and decency: “The proles had stayed human. They had not
become hardened inside.”45 In the end, Winston concludes that the proles
are trapped in a vicious circle that keeps them forever enslaved: “Until they
become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled
they cannot become conscious.”46 Whatever Orwell (or Winston) may wish,
no revolutionary agency by the proles is possible. Even if a revolution did
occur, it would just end with Big Brother in a new guise. Totalitarianism can-
not be escaped and is the end of history. As O’Brien puts it: “If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”47
Like Animal Farm, Orwell claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not an
attack on socialism or the British Labour Party. He intended the work to serve
as a warning that the dangers of totalitarianism lurked in the West as much as
the East. It was a future he hoped would not come to pass:
My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British

Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions
to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly
realised in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I
22 Chapter Two
describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that
the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that
totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and
I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of
the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races
are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought
against, could triumph anywhere.48
People who defend Orwell as left-wing, such as the British socialist John
Newsinger, claim that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not a right-wing book. Yet
as Deutscher has shown, whatever Orwell’s good intentions, the reception
of Nineteen Eighty-Four certainly served reactionary ends: “The novel has
served as a sort of an ideological super-weapon in the cold war. As in no other
book or document, the convulsive fear of communism, which has swept the
West since the end of the Second World War, has been reflected and focused
in 1984.”49 The anticommunist appropriation of Orwell was no accident. His
status as a dissenter and democratic socialist made him more appealing than
resurrecting discredited theories of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Yet Orwell’s ideas
in a fundamental way were not so different since they both saw communism
caused by evil without rhyme or reason. The end result for the “bolt from the
blue,” in either its right or “left” varieties is that revolutions always create a
hell on earth.
NOTES
1. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1958),
xx–xxi.
2. Ibid., 221.
3. Ibid., 231. For Orwell and the Independent Labour Party, see George Orwell,
“Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism
and Letters of George Orwell 1920–1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968a), 336–38 and John Newsinger, Hope
Lies in the Proles: George Orwell and the Left (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 29–32.
4. Orwell 1958, 220.
5. Ibid., 196 and 200.
6. Ibid., 215.
7. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 4. See
Chomsky’s discussion of Orwell in Spain in New Mandarins and American Power
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 23–158.
8. Orwell 1980, 62–63.
9. Ibid., 71.
10. Ibid., 53.
11. Ibid., 170.
Big Brother 23
12. “Letter to the Editor of Time and Tide,” in Orwell 1968a, 289.
13. Ibid., 279.
14. Orwell 1980, 47.
15. Ibid. For background on the POUM, see Doug Enaa Greene, “The POUM:
Those who would?” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, January 3,
2015. http://links.org.au/node/4229.
16. Why I Write in Orwell 1968a, 5.
17. See “Spilling the Spanish Beans” and “Letter to Jellinek” in Orwell 1968a, 271
and 364.
18. “Spilling the Spanish Beans” in Orwell 1968a, 271.
19. Ibid., 270.
20. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume II:
My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Jaffrey, NH:
Nonpareil Books, 2000), 346. While Orwell was completely opposed to Trotskyism,
he defended Trotskyists against Stalinist slanders. At the Nuremburg trials, both
Orwell and Koestler signed a petition calling for Rudolf Hess to be interrogated for
allegedly meeting with Trotsky. See The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell Volume IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950, ed. Sonia Orwell and
Ian Angus (London: The Camelot Press Ltd., 1968c), 115–16. Orwell was also in cor-
respondence with Victor Serge and read his Memoirs of a Revolutionary. See ibid.,
122–23, 159, and 194. He also read Trotsky’s Stalin with interest. See ibid., 194–96.
Finally, he mocked the Moscow Trials. See his review of Eugene Lyons, Assignment
in Utopia in 1968a, 368–69.
21. “Review: Russia under Soviet Rule” in Orwell 1968a, 381.
22. “Not Counting Niggers,” in ibid., 398. Austro-Fascism in lower-case in the
original. In Inside the Whale, written the following year, Orwell still feared that an
age of totalitarianism was fated to fall upon the world: “The autonomous individual
is going to be stamped out of existence. But this means that literature, in the form in
which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism
is coming to an end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is
barely imaginable.” See ibid., 523.
23. “The Lion and the Unicorn” in Orwell 2000, 190.
24. Ibid., 93.
25. See “Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau” in Orwell 2000, 25.
26. See Raffles and Miss Blandish in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
of George Orwell Volume III: As I Please 1943–1945, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968b), 222. In “My Country Right or
Left,” Orwell said the following about middle-class intellectuals and revolutionary
patriotism: “It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a
Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes.” Quoted in
“My Country Right or Left” in Orwell 1968a, 540.
27. George Orwell, Animal Farm (Harlow: Longman Group Ltd., 1983), 88.
28. Quoted in Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of
a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009), 246.
24 Chapter Two
29. Quoted in John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 118.
Later Orwell said: “I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth
was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” See George Orwell,
“George Orwell’s Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm,” George Orwell
Foundation. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/books
-by-orwell/animal-farm/preface-to-the-ukrainian-edition-of-animal-farm-by-george
-orwell/.
30. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution or What is Happening in the
World Right Now (London: Putnam and Company Limited, 1944), 243.
31. Ibid., 117. See also Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the
World: A Life (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), 91–114.
32. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John
Day Company, Inc., 1943), 224.
33. Orwell 1968b, 328.
34. “You and the Atomic Bomb” in Orwell 1968c, 9.
35. “Letter to Roger Senhouse—26 December 1948,” in Orwell 1968c, 460.
36. “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution” in Orwell 1968c 178.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 177.
39. Scott Lucas, Orwell (London: Haus Publishing Limited, 2003), 91. See also
Duncan White, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War (New
York: Custom House, 2019), 219.
40. Quoted in Lucas 2003, 109. See also Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural
Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press,
2013), 252.
41. See “Orwell’s letter to Victor Gollancz—25 March 1947” in Orwell 1968c., 309.
42. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classic, 1983), 68. Goldstein’s book is
an obvious parallel for Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed. See Isaac Deutscher, ‘1984’—
The Mysticism of Cruelty in Heretics and Renegades (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, Inc., 1969), 47. However, the theoretical side of Goldstein’s book bears
a resemblance to the managerial society described in James Burnham’s Managerial
Revolution. Newsinger argues that the book draws from the work of Dwight Mac-
Donald’s theorizations of bureaucratic collectivism far more than from Burnham. See
Newsinger 1999, 127. See also Anna Chen, “George Orwell: A Literary Trotskyist?”
International Socialism 2, no. 85 (Winter 1999). Marxists Internet Archive. https://
www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1999/isj2–085/chen htm.
43. Orwell 1983, 217.
44. Ibid., 60.
45. Ibid., 136.
46. Ibid., 61.
47. Ibid., 220.
48. “Letter to Francis A. Henson (extract)—16 June 1949,” in Orwell 1968c, 502.
Emphasis is Orwell’s.
49. “Mysticism of Cruelty” in Deutscher 1969, 35. Newsinger says the following
about the leftist credentials of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The fable offered
Big Brother 25
little comfort to the conservative right. Not only did it wholeheartedly endorse the
initial revolutionary act, it also went on implicitly to condemn the Soviet Union, not
for being socialist, but for betraying socialism, for becoming indistinguishable in its
conduct from the other great powers, for exploiting its own people and joining in the
division of the world.” See also Newsinger 1999, 116. For the impact of Orwell and
Nineteen Eighty-Four in the United States, see Saunders 2013, 247–53.
Chapter Three
Stalinism as a Bolt From the Blue

The Counter-Enlightenment Project
A. TOTALITARIANISM
The dominant “bolt from the blue” approach of analyzing Stalinism and com-
munism can be summarized with a single word: totalitarianism. More than a
mere authoritarian dictatorship, totalitarianism implies absolute domination
over all aspects of society, even reaching into the souls of ordinary people to
brainwash them. As a theory of Stalinism, totalitarianism cannot explain the
internal dynamics of the Soviet Union since it posits a completely static soci-
ety ruled by unchallenged terror. History is frozen, with any internal reform
or rebellion from below deemed impossible.‌‌
While it fails as a theory of history, totalitarianism served two other major
functions. First, it acted as a convenient rationale for the Cold War against
the Soviet Union. Secondly, totalitarianism was the ideological foundation of
a new counter-Enlightenment project, which sought to discredit the very idea
of an alternative to capitalism. In its most developed form, the high priests of
this counter-Enlightenment project argued that the origins of totalitarianism
lay in radical Enlightenment philosophy and the French Revolution. The mere
idea of reason was condemned as the original sin of communism. However,
totalitarianism and the counter-Enlightenment project did not emerge fully
grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. It took time and effort for the scat-
tered ideas found in Orwell, Burnham, and others to finally congeal together.
Originally, the term “totalitarianism” had nothing to do with communism
at all. One of its first uses came in 1923 when the Italian journalist Giovanni
Amendola used totalitarianism to describe the nature of Benito Mussolini’s
fascist dictatorship. Amendola meant this as a pejorative, but Mussolini
proudly adopted totalitarianism as his own label: “Our formula is this: every-
thing within the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state.”1
Later, Mussolini’s official philosopher Giovanni Gentile expanded on the
27
28 Chapter Three
term in his Origins and Doctrine of Fascism (1927), making totalitarian-

ism central to the very definition of fascism: “The first point, therefore, that
must be established in a definition of Fascism, is the totalitarian character
of its doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political order and direc-
tion of the nation, but with its will, thought and sentiment.”2 Therefore, both
Mussolini and Gentile accepted that fascism was a totalitarian doctrine that
sought to create an organic unity between the state, economy, and society that
incorporated the masses in its mission of national rebirth.
By the 1930s, totalitarianism was one of many ideas used by oppositional
Marxists such as Boris Souvarine, Leon Trotsky, and Victor Serge to describe
Stalin’s rule in the USSR. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky identified the
growth of social inequality and the power of the ruling bureaucracy as the two
main totalitarian characteristics of Stalinism. While Trotsky noted the simi-
larity between the Soviet Union and fascist states, he did not consider them
identical since they were based upon different property relations.3
Others on the left worked out more systematic theories of totalitarianism to
describe the Soviet Union. Using the theory of elites developed by the soci-
ologist Vilfredo Pareto, Franz Borkenau argued that the Bolsheviks created
a new and oppressive elite society. He believed that Bolshevik elitism was
something that it shared with fascism: “From the point of view of the theory
of domination and of elites, Bolshevism and Fascism can only really be
treated as slightly different specimens of the same species of dictatorship.”4
Borkenau concluded that Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Stalinist Russia
were all totalitarian states that were dominated by new elites and one-party
regimes that claimed total power in both political life and over the economy.
Another left analysis of the USSR as a new totalitarian state was advanced
by the German social democrat Rudolf Hilferding in State Capitalism or
Totalitarian State Economy (1940). Hilferding also said that Germany and
Italy were moving in the same totalitarian direction.5
On the political right, Winston Churchill saw Nazi Germany as a totalitar-
ian threat to the British Empire and Europe. As Britain rushed to appease
Hitler in 1938, Churchill argued that Nazism was a totalitarian menace on
par with the Soviet Union:
We are confronted with another theme. It is not a new theme; it leaps out upon
us from the Dark Ages—racial persecution, religious intolerance, deprivation
of free speech, the conception of the citizen as a mere soulless fraction of the
State. To this has been added the cult of war. Children are to be taught in their
earliest schooling the delights and profits of conquest and aggression. A whole
mighty community has been drawn painfully, by severe privations, into a war-
like frame. They are held in this condition, which they relish no more than we
do, by a party organisation, several millions strong, who derive all kinds of
The Counter-Enlightenment Project 29
profits, good and bad, from the upkeep of the regime. Like the Communists,
the Nazis tolerate no opinion but their own. Like the Communists, they feed on
hatred. Like the Communists, they must seek, from time to time, and always at
shorter intervals, a new target, a new prize, a new victim. The Dictator, in all his
pride, is held in the grip of his Party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go
back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of
old, be devoured by them. All-strong without, he is all-weak within. As Byron
wrote a hundred years ago: “These Pagod things of Sabre sway, with fronts of
brass and feet of clay.”6
After the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, many across the political spectrum in
Britain and the United States claimed that Germany and Russia were part of
the same species of totalitarianism. The idea of totalitarian twins was dropped
once the Wehrmacht invaded the USSR. Now, Stalin and the Red Army were
praised in Western propaganda as valiant freedom-loving allies in the struggle
against Hitler.
The war did not mean that the concept of totalitarianism was completely
abandoned. The Frankfurt School theorist, Franz Neumann utilized it in
Behemoth (1942), his study of Nazi Germany. However, Neumann saw
Germany’s totalitarianism located in its monopoly capitalist economy and
did not consider it to be structurally similar to the USSR. These ideas were
welcomed in influential government circles such as the State Department and
the OSS without much issue.
Other ideas on totalitarianism were considered beyond the pale of respect-
ability. For instance, the sociologist Robert Nisbet pioneered one of the later
arguments of the counter-Enlightenment that Rousseau was the intellectual
source of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. As Nisbet recalled, his ideas
were largely marginalized during the war: “‘Totalitarianism’ was not a ready
concept in the minds of American political scientists and historians during the
first three decades of totalitarianism’s history in Europe. . . . There was much
resistance in American universities to any use of ‘totalitarian’ that covered
alike the Soviets and Nazis and their states.”7
Totalitarianism took on a new life with the beginning of the Cold War. The
defeat of the Third Reich meant that the Soviet Union was now considered
the new enemy to the American way of life. To fight the communist threat
required not only weapons and soldiers, but experts who understood it. Now
the United States government and businesses began funding research pro-
grams on communism and the Soviet Union. The subsequent expansion of
Soviet studies was immense according to Stephen Cohen: “Funded gener-
ously by private foundations and the federal government, Russian-Soviet area
programs spread quickly from Columbia and Harvard in the East to more
than a hundred universities and colleges across the country. Administration,
30 Chapter Three
faculty, courses, graduate studies, academic and government jobs, scholarly

publications, and library acquisitions proliferated.”8 Many of these anti-
communist scholars willingly worked with the American State Department,
military, and the Central Intelligence Agency to fight communism. The few
leftists and others critical of the Cold War were largely driven out of aca-
demia once the Red Scare began.
As opposed to its earlier inconsistent uses, totalitarianism was now fully
fleshed out to act as the new anti-communist consensus. One of the semi-
nal works was Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Arendt
defined totalitarianism as a form of all-encompassing state power that rules
people through a machinery of terror and violence. She said that totalitarian-
ism in Germany and Russia was a radically new form of government that
aimed to remake society and human beings.
When it came to the ingredients that allowed totalitarianism to emerge,
Arendt found them in anti-Semitism, imperialism, and mass society. The
first two conditions were necessary for Nazism, but not for Stalinism.
However, both forms of totalitarianism could only grow with modern culture
and mass politics: “Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are
masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political
organization.”9
Arendt argued that in totalitarian movements, mass politics is transformed
into the frenzy of the mob. It is from the mob where aspiring dictators like
Hitler appear: “But the most gifted mass leaders of our time have still risen
from the mob rather than from the masses. Hitler’s biography reads like a
textbook example in this respect.”10 Since Hitler owed his power to brown-
shirt thugs, Arendt did not think he was a bourgeois instrument: “The mob
as leader of these masses was no longer the agent of the bourgeoisie or of
anyone else except the masses.”11 In other words, it was murderous mobs, not
the structural features of capitalism, that made Nazi totalitarianism possible.
Russia was different since Stalin was not the product of a street mob but
belonged to the Bolshevik party machine. To create totalitarianism, Stalin
used the bureaucracy to atomize society and usurp the power of the soviets.
This was a steady process that was only completed during the purges, when
Stalin’s power became truly totalitarian:
Mass atomization in Soviet society was achieved by the skillful use of repeated
purges which invariably precede actual group liquidation. . . . In the last analy-
sis, it has been through the development of this device to its farthest and most
fantastic extremes that Bolshevik rulers have succeeded in creating an atomized
and individualized society the like of which we have never seen before and
which events or catastrophes alone would hardly have brought about.12
Despite their different starting points, Arendt said that Nazism and Stalinism
possessed identical organizational forms, proving their shared totalitar-
ian nature:
In this, as in so many other respects, Nazism and Bolshevism arrived at the

same organizational result from very different historical beginnings. The
Nazis started with the fiction of a conspiracy and modeled themselves, more
or less consciously, after the example of the secret society of the Elders of
Zion, whereas the Bolsheviks came from a revolutionary party, whose aim was
one-party dictatorship, passed through a stage in which the party was “entirely
apart and above everything” to the moment when the Politburo of the party
was “entirely apart from and above everything”; finally Stalin imposed upon
this party structure the rigid totalitarian rules of its conspiratory sector and only
then discovered the need for a central fiction to maintain the iron discipline of
a secret society under the conditions of a mass organization. The Nazi devel-
opment may be more logical, more consistent in itself, but the history of the
Bolshevik party offers a better illustration of the essentially fictitious character
of totalitarianism, precisely because the fictitious global conspiracies against
and according to which the Bolshevik conspiracy is supposedly organized have
not been ideologically fixed.13
Arendt said that both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany provided a tem-
plate for a new breed of dictatorship that was unlike any others in history:
Up to now we know only two authentic forms of totalitarian domination: the dic-
tatorship of National Socialism after 1938, and the dictatorship of Bolshevism
since 1930. These forms of domination differ basically from other kinds of
dictatorial, despotic or tyrannical rule; and even though they have developed,
with a certain continuity, from party dictatorships, their essentially totalitarian
features are new and cannot be derived from one-party systems. The goal of
one-party systems is not only to seize the government administration but, by
filling all offices with party members, to achieve a complete amalgamation of
state and party, so that after the seizure of power the party becomes a kind of
propaganda organization for the government. This system is “total” only in a
negative sense, namely, in that the ruling party will tolerate no other parties, no
opposition and no freedom of political opinion. Once a party dictatorship has
come to power, it leaves the original power relationship between state and party
intact; the government and the army exercise the same power as before, and
the “revolution” consists only in the fact that all government positions are now
occupied by party members. In all these cases the power of the party rests on
a monopoly guaranteed by the state and the party no longer possesses its own
power center.14
Building off Arendt’s work, the political scientists Carl Friedrich and
Zbigniew Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956)
32 Chapter Three
refined totalitarianism to six main features: 1) an all-embracing ideology; 2)

a single party typically led by one dictator; 3) rule by terror carried out by a
secret police force; 4) total control of the press and all forms of communi-
cation; 5) a state monopoly over all weapons; 6) state control of the entire
economy.15
While the totalitarian school was united in their anti-communism, they
were not homogeneous in their thinking. Theorists ranged from democratic
socialists to classical liberals to conservatives to reactionaries. There was
lively debate and disagreement among them on issues great and small. While
Arendt saw totalitarianism as a product of modernity, Karl Popper in The
Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) claimed that it had roots in Plato and
Aristotle: “What we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition
which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.”16
Another disagreement lay over economics. Many anti-communists were
supporters of the New Deal and some sort of welfare state. However,
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) argued that totalitarianism
began with state interference in the natural workings of capitalism. Hayek
said that totalitarianism was premised on a collectivist—as opposed to an
individualist—worldview:
And, indeed, socialists everywhere were the first to recognise that the task
they had set themselves required the general acceptance of a common
Weltanschauung, of a definite set of values. It was in these efforts to produce a
mass movement supported by such a single world view, that the socialists first
created most of the instruments of indoctrination of which Nazis and Fascists
have made such effective use.17
Considering his fear of the power of collectivism, Hayek agreed with Arendt
that mass politics was a breeding ground for totalitarianism. This led him to
distrust democracy since the people could vote the “wrong way” for collec-
tivist parties who would institute state control of the economy. Hayek stated
that a planned economy would naturally require the use of totalitarian means
to enforce it: “But in a society which for its functioning depends on central
planning, this control cannot be made dependent on a majority being able to
agree; it will often be necessary that the will of a small minority be imposed
upon the people, because this minority will be the largest group able to
agree among themselves on the question at issue.”18 For Hayek, the ultimate
guarantee against totalitarianism lay in the unrestricted power of free-market
capitalism.
For all their internal debates, the totalitarian school told a singular story
when it came to the history of communism. The script practically writes
itself. The roots of communist totalitarianism were found in Lenin’s idea of
the vanguard party developed in What Is to Be Done? Supposedly, Lenin

said workers were too backward and stupid to understand socialist theory.
For their own good, the working class must be led by a communist elite.
Lenin’s vanguard party served as the model for all other communist parties
in their quest to achieve totalitarian rule. As Alfred Meyer wrote in his study
of Leninism:
Perhaps Lenin’s most conspicuous contribution to twentieth century politics is

his conception of the Communist Party as a creative history-making force and
as the general staff of the world revolution. In the Bolshevik movement, he cre-
ated the model on which many other modern totalitarian parties have been built.
Lenin must therefore be considered a pioneer of the totalitarianism of our age.19
Since the Bolsheviks were a small conspiratorial organization by design,

they were not representative of the Russian people. Thanks to Lenin’s clever
manipulation and demagoguery, the Bolsheviks took power in 1917 not
through a popular uprising, but by a violent coup d’état.
Following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks showed their true colors
by monopolizing power and launching the Red Terror. After their victory in
the civil war, the Bolsheviks were forced to retreat partially from totalitarian-
ism by introducing the New Economic Policy (NEP). After Lenin died, there
was a succession struggle between Trotsky, Stalin, and Bukharin within the
Bolshevik Party. According to Sovietologist Adam Ulam, this struggle had
little to do with either politics or program, but was wholly about personalities
and power:
Here, Communism seemed tainted by an original sin of its own: a lust for power
which made those who actually wield it feel they could never have enough.
And for those who tasted power and then lost it the addiction seemed to remain
as strong as ever. They could not be appeased with positions of honor and
influence, ministerial and ambassadorial posts that were still freely distributed
to party leaders in disgrace. These were but temporary stops in their descent
they felt.20
Stalin, like all other communists, could not resist the allure of power. His
obsessions, ruthlessness, and sadism exemplified the Bolshevik mental uni-
verse: “But do we need any sensational revelations to understand Stalin? No,
the explanation of his life is as banal as many of his own speeches: he was
corrupted by absolute power. . . . His mentality mirrored that of Communism
as a whole, though in a hugely exaggerated form.”21
After defeating his rivals, Stalin abandoned the NEP and embarked upon
a campaign of industrialization and collectivization. This extended the total
control of the Communist Party across the vast reaches of the USSR. Later in
34 Chapter Three
the 1930s, Stalin destroyed all opposition and reduced the populace to slavery
and passivity. A true totalitarian state had been created in Russia that dwarfed
the power of the czars. Now the USSR was permanently ruled by terror. As
Merle Fainsod said in How Russia Is Ruled (1953), “terror is the linchpin
of modern totalitarianism.”22 Following the brutal test of World War II, the
Soviet Union emerged as a military superpower challenging the free world.
Now the United States must defeat totalitarianism, otherwise the communists
would usher in a new age of godlessness and servitude.
B. THE REVISIONIST CHALLENGE
In the early period of the Cold War, totalitarianism’s claims were accepted by
the mainstream of American society without much question. Ironically, this
produced a level of ideological uniformity in the United States more consis-
tent with its communist enemy than the “open society” that it claimed to be
defending. A major thaw in Soviet studies began in the 1960s and 1970s as
a new generation of revisionist scholars emerged. These revisionists such as
Robert C. Tucker, Moshe Lewin, Stephen Cohen, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and J.
Arch Getty were open to new perspectives that challenged many of the key
precepts of totalitarianism and anti-communism.
Even in the 1950s at its height, the totalitarian school was not unchal-
lenged. There were a number of dissenters, and among the most prominent
was Isaac Deutscher. An independent Marxist, Deutscher was the author of
widely acclaimed biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. He offered an alter-
native interpretation of the USSR that questioned many anti-communist
truths, namely that Stalinism was a faithful evolution of Bolshevism and
Marxism. As will be discussed later, while Deutscher slid into apologetics
for Stalinism, he was honest enough to admit the existence of communist
alternatives. Despite Deutscher’s impressive scholarship, he was blacklisted
from academia and forced to work as a journalist. When there was a possibil-
ity of Deutscher being awarded a professorship at the University of Sussex,
the Cold War liberal Isaiah Berlin made sure that did not happen. Writing to
Sussex’s vice chancellor, Berlin said: “The candidate of whom you speak is
the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I
should find morally intolerable.”23
Another nonconformist was the former British diplomat Edward Hallett
Carr. Originally a right-wing liberal, one of his earlier works was Karl Marx:
A Study in Fanaticism (1934), which was an unsympathetic biography. Later
in life, Carr found the work so embarrassing that he refused to allow it to be
reprinted. During World War II, he developed a deep admiration for the Soviet
Union: “In The Times I very quickly began to plug the Russian alliance; and,
when this was vindicated by Russian endurance and the Russian victory, it
revived my initial faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and
a historical turning-point.”24 After the war, Carr wrote his magnum opus,
a fourteen-volume History of Soviet Russia (1950–1978), which covered
the first twelve years of Soviet history (1917–1929). His work was meticu-
lously researched with an enormous amount of data gathered from primary
sources and a host of secondary ones. While Carr was far more sympathetic
to the Soviet Union than the totalitarian school, he accepted their view that
Stalinism necessarily grew out of Bolshevism: “I think we must accept rapid
industrialization as a postulate of Soviet policy. Neither in the climate of the
period, nor retrospectively, did any alternative policy seem plausible.”25
Despite their different temperaments—Carr being the pragmatic realist and
Deutscher being a committed Marxist—the two were close friends and schol-
arly compatriots. For years, they practically stood alone offering alternatives
to the onslaught of anti-communism.
The sensibility of the sixties and the protests against the Vietnam War
extended from the streets into Soviet studies. These early revisionists ques-
tioned anti-communist orthodoxy that the Soviet Union had started the
Cold War and was bent on global conquest. As Ronald Grigor Suny notes:
“the revisionist undermining of the orthodox liberal consensus profoundly
affected many young scholars who were then able to interrogate hitherto
axiomatic foundational notions about the Soviet Union and the nature of
communism.”26 Drawing upon new fields of social movements, cultural his-
tory, and structuralism, the revisionists undertook major challenges to the
totalitarian paradigm.
One of the older revisionists was Robert Tucker, a former diplomat to the
USSR and a longtime student of Marxism. In contrast to the totalitarians,
Tucker believed that the Soviet Union possessed a dynamic system. Yet he
agreed with them that Stalin exercised near-total power, an assumption not
shared by later revisionists. Tucker broke with totalitarianism in other ways.
He did not view Stalinism as a natural evolution of Leninism, but believed its
roots lay more in czarism and Russian culture. In an ironic twist, Tucker saw
the USSR and Nazi Germany as similar totalitarian regimes, but he said they
were both right-wing and anti-communist:
Kinship is not identity. There were differences, among them the fact that
Stalin’s Bolshevism, despite its covert and after the war increasingly overt
anti-Semitism, did not preach a biological racism like Hitler’s. But the like-
nesses were many and deep. Both regimes, with the proviso just mentioned in
Stalinism’s case, were anti-Communist. Both were chauvinist, and idealized ele-
ments of the national past. Both were statist and imperialist. Both were enemy-
obsessed. Both were terroristic and practiced torture in their prisons. Under both
36 Chapter Three
regimes state terrorism was linked with a theory of international conspiracy: a

Jewish anti-Aryan conspiracy in Hitler’s case and an anti-Soviet one in Stalin’s.
Both were regimes of personal dictatorship with a leader cult. Both featured
cults of heroes and heroism. Both exalted youth, physical strength, and moth-
erhood. The one emphasized what was narodny; the other, what was volkisch.
Both favored grandiosity in architecture. Both were antiliberal, anticosmopoli-
tan, and antimodernist. They were both radicalisms of the right.27
Another revisionist was Moshe Lewin, a Red Army veteran and a former
member of the Israeli Communist Party, a background that provided him with
unique insight into both the Soviet Union and leftist politics. In Lenin’s Last
Struggle (1968), he challenged the Cold War stereotype of Lenin as a brutal
dictator who laid the groundwork for Stalin. Lewin argued that at the end of
his life, Lenin was deeply concerned with the growing bureaucratization of
the USSR and wanted Stalin removed from power. After Lenin’s death, the
Stalinist bureaucracy proceeded to annihilate Bolshevism. Lewin concluded
that Stalinism represented a radical break with Leninism in every way imag-
inable: “Stalin worked hard, in fact, to eliminate ideologically and physically
both Bolshevism as a political party and Leninism as its guiding strategic
orientation.”28
Lewin rejected the claims that Stalinism was inevitable since this followed
a teleological and fatalistic view of history that refused to admit the existence
of alternative paths:
But unless they take a rigidly deterministic view of history, in which case the
fact that events followed a particular pattern is of itself sufficient proof that no
other pattern was possible, then historians who interpret Stalin’s role in this light
must be prepared to support their theory with proofs, as they would any other. In
order to furnish such proof, they must examine the alternative courses of action
which were proposed at the time, they must show what their weaknesses were,
and how in the end they came to be rejected. It is just such alternatives that
concern us in the present study, for in our view it is equally legitimate to argue
from the opposite standpoint, and to demonstrate, where there are grounds for
doing so, that there existed an alternative, which was a valid one but which, for
certain reasons, was not adopted.29
Lewin’s preferred alternative to Stalinism was the market socialist Nikolai

Bukharin. During the 1960s and 1970s, he sympathized with socialist reform-
ers in the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union considering their criticisms
of the wasteful overcentralized economies analogous to those raised by
Bukharin decades earlier.30
Another revisionist who supported Bukharin as an alternative to Stalin
was the Princeton professor, Stephen F. Cohen. In his biography of Bukharin,
Cohen argued that the Bolsheviks were not an ideological monolith but con-
tained many different ideas that were always contending with each other.31
This tradition of Bolshevik openness and pluralism continued into the 1920s
with the NEP. For Cohen, the NEP era was a lost golden age of Bolshevism.
He did not consider Stalinism inevitable since Bukharin’s program was avail-
able. When Stalin ended the NEP and launched the revolution from above,
this was something no Bolshevik had ever contemplated: “Stalin’s new poli-
cies of 1929–33, the ‘great change’ as they became known, were a radical
departure from Bolshevik programmatic thinking. No Bolshevik leader or
faction had ever advocated anything akin to imposed collectivization, the
‘liquidation’ of alleged prosperous peasants (kulaks), breakneck heavy indus-
trialization, the destruction of the entire market sector, and a ‘plan’ that was
in reality no plan at all, only hypercentralized control of the economy plus
exhortations.”32
Cohen had a direct impact on the Soviet Union as well. Like Lewin, Cohen
sympathized with Bukharin-inspired reformists such as Mikhail Gorbachev.
When Glasnost and Perestroika began, he enthusiastically welcomed the
initiatives. Cohen even traveled to the USSR and became friends with
Gorbachev, who welcomed the scholar into his inner circle. After reading
Cohen’s work, Gorbachev decided to rehabilitate Bukharin in 1988.33
While Tucker, Lewin, and Cohen all stressed the discontinuity between
Leninism and Stalinism, other revisionists such as Sheila Fitzpatrick empha-
sized overall continuity. For Fitzpatrick, the essential question regarding the
Russian Revolution was not about alternative paths, but how the gains of
the Bolshevik Revolution were secured by Stalin’s “second revolution” in
the 1930s:
I trace lines of continuity between Lenin’s revolution and Stalin’s. As to the

inclusion of Stalin’s “revolution from above” in the Russian Revolution, this
is a question on which historians may legitimately differ. But the issue here is
not whether 1917 and 1929 were alike, but whether they were part of the same
process. Napoleon’s revolutionary wars can be included in our general concept
of the French Revolution, even if we do not regard them as an embodiment of
the spirit of 1789; and a similar approach seems legitimate in the case of the
Russian Revolution.34
Fitzpatrick argued that the Five-Year Plans opened up new opportunities for
the working class to fill posts in the expanding party and state bureaucra-
cies. In what she dubbed the Soviet “Cultural Revolution,” the old admin-
istrative elite was replaced by hundreds of thousands of workers, who were
rapidly promoted into vacant positions. Fitzpatrick claims that the Cultural
Revolution was not simply about material gain, but there was a genuineness
38 Chapter Three
involved since many truly believed in the ideals of communism. Whatever the
limitations of the Cultural Revolution, Fitzpatrick says it represented a radical
challenge to bourgeois values in all areas of Soviet life.
She has also confronted the totalitarian thesis on several other counts. For
instance, Fitzpatrick has shown through her studies of social history and
everyday life that the Soviet Union was not an inert society, even during
the darkest days of Stalinism. In Stalin’s Peasants (1994), she detailed how
the peasantry managed to both accommodate and resist collectivization. In
Everyday Stalinism (1999), Fitzpatrick looked at how the populace endured
the new ways of life that Stalin imposed upon them in the 1930s.35
In another blow to totalitarianism, Fitzpatrick observed that there was real
support for socialism and Stalin. Ordinary Soviet people sincerely believed
that they were part of a grand historical experiment to construct a radically
new world. Fitzpatrick concluded that the lived reality of Stalinism demol-
ished the edifice of an all-powerful totalitarian state: “The world of Soviet
government . . . was characterized not by totalitarian controls but rather by
poor communications, lack of effective accountability, institutional habits of
hoarding and ‘off-budget’ distribution, credulous and ill-educated officials,
and personalistic practices.”36
Finally, there is the work of UCLA historian J. Arch Getty. In his ground-
breaking work Origins of the Great Purges (1985), Getty challenged anti-
communist claims that Stalin launched the purges as part of a master plan to
achieve absolute power, noting that this thesis rested upon the false assump-
tion that the Soviet bureaucracy exercised total control. Instead, Getty argued
that the Soviet state was remarkably inefficient and weak:
Although the Soviet government was certainly dictatorial (or tried to be), it was
not totalitarian. The technical and technological sophistication that separates
totalitarianism from dictatorship was lacking in the thirties. . . . On a local
level (where most of the population interacts with the government), political
administration was marked by incompetence, sloth, inertia, and real cultural
backwardness. The system had the disadvantages of bureaucratism without the
corresponding benefits of efficient bureaucracy. Administration on a local level
often resembled a popular peasant culture that was trying clumsily and some-
times halfheartedly to be a modern bureaucracy.37
Getty argues that the purges were the culmination of a long struggle by Stalin
and the party center in Moscow to assert effective control over the distant
periphery. By bringing the regional bureaucracies into line, it would be easier
for Stalin to implement a coordinated policy across the whole country. Getty
notes that the struggle between center and periphery is normal in political his-
tory, but in the USSR it assumed violent forms that got out of hand:
A chaotic local bureaucracy, a quasi-feudal network of politicians accustomed

to arresting people, and a set of perhaps insoluble political and social problems
created an atmosphere conducive to violence. . . . It is not inconsistent with
the evidence to argue that the Ezhovshchina was rather a radical, even hys-
terical, reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched officeholders were destroyed
from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary
puritanism.38
In contrast to totalitarian theorists, who rely upon émigré and gulag literature
as source material to explain the purges, Getty prefers to consult archives.
He discounts a great deal of this material—including Trotsky—as too far
removed from where major decisions were made:
Although there is nothing inherently false about such sources, the authors, by
definition, were on the “outside” of the decision-making process. They can
tell us what the camps were like but not why they existed. Their guesses and
observations about political decision making may be interesting but can hardly
be taken as primary source material.39
Getty concluded that the Soviet Union’s dysfunctional bureaucracy, lack of

centralized control, and the unplanned nature of the purges severely undercut
the totalitarian school. In regards to Merle Fainsod’s characterization of the
USSR as an inefficient totalitarianism, Getty states: “One wonders how much
inefficiency totalitarianism can stand and still have explanatory power.”40
The revisionists under discussion, including others not mentioned such as
Alexander Rabinowitch, Wendy Goldman, Robert Thurston, Ronald Grigor
Suny, and William G. Rosenberg, did not create a new orthodoxy to take
the place of the totalitarian school. Rather, the lasting success of revision-
ism demolished the cartoonish caricatures of anti-communism by subjecting
Stalinism and the Soviet Union to serious study.
C. ANTI-JACOBINISM
Even though the totalitarian school more than proved itself as an ideologi-
cal lynchpin for anti-communism, many of its adherents did not reject the
heritage of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, or even social reform-
ism. For example, Friedrich and Brzezinski explicitly denied that Jacobinism
was a totalitarian movement: “In the French revolution especially, the vio-
lent controversies over the ideological ‘meaning’ of the revolution led to
the terror. But since the ideology lacked that pseudo-scientific ingredient
which has enabled the Communist and Fascist totalitarians to insist on the
40 Chapter Three
‘mercilessness of the dialectics’ (Stalin) and on ‘ice-cold reasoning’ (Hitler),

a totalitarian ideology did not develop.”41
Other theorists did not locate the sources of Lenin’s totalitarianism in
Jacobinism. Alfred Meyer’s Leninism makes no mention at all of Robespierre
or the Jacobins. Likewise, Leonard Schapiro’s study of the Communist Party
fails to do so as well. Adam Ulam’s The Bolsheviks claims that Lenin bor-
rowed his organizational forms from the Narodniks and the Russian Jacobin
Pyotr Tkachev: “An uncompromising insistence on centralization and disci-
pline, contempt for the possibility of any spontaneous uprising by the major-
ity, those are the threads uniting the Russian Jacobin Tkachev to the Socialist
Lenin. Implicit in both is an antidemocratic elitist attitude.”42 At most, Ulam
links Lenin to Jacobinism at one remove, but does not condemn the legacy of
the French Revolution.
Finally, there is Hannah Arendt, who forcefully denied that Robespierre
and Jacobinism were totalitarian. Rather, she saw the anti-Jacobin and royal-
ist anti-Semites of the Dreyfus Affair as the forerunners of totalitarianism.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, she praised Robespierre’s condemnation
of colonialism.43 Only later in On Revolution (1960) would Arendt see a line
of continuity stretching from Robespierre to Hegel to Marx ending in Stalin,
with their shared belief in historical necessity.
In other instances, anti-communists looked favorably on non-revolutionary
reformists who drew inspiration from the French Revolution. For example,
Ulam praised the defeated Menshevik opponents of Lenin: “It often hap-
pens that a movement or cause defeated by history gains the reputation for
moral probity and democratic scruples. Such has been the case, and in the
main justly so, with the Mensheviks.”44 In other cases, pro-American social
democrats in Europe—who still claimed to be Marxists into the 1950s—were
positively juxtaposed to Leninist totalitarianism. John Plamenatz’s German
Marxism & Russian Communism is typical in this regard. He says that
Marxism was fine in the West, where it was successfully domesticated and
“had the influence of Marxism been confined to the West, it would probably
have done much good and little harm.”45 It was in the East that Marxism was
twisted beyond recognition and became totalitarian: “Lenin left Marxism
poorer than he found it; he took little interest in what was truly profound or
subtle in it, and used it mostly as a source of quotations and slogans to justify
his many and not always consistent policies. He did not even understand how
he had distorted it.”46
In The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952) and its later two sequels,
Israeli historian Jacob Talmon provided a lengthy treatment on the “totalitar-
ian” connection between Jacobinism and Bolshevism. Talmon first noticed
these parallels when he was a student in 1936. While writing a graduate paper
on the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, the first Moscow Trial occurred. Talmon
immediately saw a Dialectic of Saturn at work where terror and purges con-
sumed the revolutionaries: “The parallel seemed to suggest the existence of
some unfathomable and inescapable law which causes revolutionary salva-
tionist schemes to evolve into regimes of terror, and the promise of a perfect
direct democracy to assume in practice the form of totalitarian dictatorship.”47
Talmon identified this “unfathomable and inescapable law” as the Radical
Enlightenment. According to him, the Enlightenment was composed of two
wings that he deemed liberal democratic and totalitarian democratic. The for-
mer were pragmatists and reformers who upheld the values of individual free-
dom. They embraced liberalism and compromise instead of absolutist politics.
The latter were on the opposite extreme: they were uncompromising revolu-
tionaries. Totalitarian democrats were united around an all-encompassing
worldview (Weltanschauung) drawn from “abstract reason” which wanted to
rationally reorder society and perfect humanity.
Like Nisbet, Talmon sees the philosophical source of totalitarian democ-
racy in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762). According to
Rousseau, men are naturally good, while evil only came from bad laws and
institutions. In order to create a harmonious social order where human beings
could flourish, Rousseau said all unjust laws must be removed. In this ideal
state, Rousseau argued that laws should express the “general will” of the
people. However, the people were corrupted by unjust laws and traditions,
meaning that they did not always know what served the general will. To make
the popular interest conform to the general will, Rousseau stated that it might
be necessary to force people to be free: “Thus, in order for the social compact
to avoid being an empty formula, it tacitly entails the commitment—which
alone can give force to the others—that whoever refuses to obey the general
will be forced to do so by the entire body. This means merely that he will be
forced to be free.”48 For Talmon, it is this idea of the general will that is the
seed of totalitarian democracy.
And yet, it is only during the French Revolution that the true nature of the
general will was finally revealed when Robespierre and the Jacobins adopted
Rousseau as their patron saint:
Now at the very foundation of the principle of direct and indivisible democracy,
and the expectation of unanimity, there is the implication of dictatorship, as the
history of many a referendum has shown. If a constant appeal to the people as a
whole, not just to a small representative body, is kept up, and at the same time
unanimity is postulated, there is no escape from dictatorship. This was implied
in Rousseau’s emphasis on the all-important point that the leaders must put only
questions of a general nature to the people, and, moreover, must know how
to put the right question. The question must have so obvious an answer that a
different sort of answer would appear plain treason or perversion. If unanimity
42 Chapter Three
is what is desired, it must be engineered through intimidation, election tricks,

or the organization of the spontaneous popular expression through the activ-
ists busying themselves with petitions, public demonstrations, and a violent
campaign of denunciation. This was what the Jacobins and the organizers of
people’s petitions, revolutionary journées, and other forms of direct expression
of the people’s will read into Rousseau.49
Talmon argued that the Jacobin dictatorship was not just a series of emer-
gency measures to save the Republic, but was the necessary consequence of
Robespierre’s ardent messianic and totalitarian faith. As a result, the Jacobins
and their fanatical supporters created a totalitarian party and terroristic regime
to enforce the general will:
The dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety was thus no mere tyranny
of a handful of men clinging to power and in possession of all the means of
coercion, no mere police system in a beleaguered fortress. It rested on closely
knit and highly disciplined cells and nuclei in every town and village, from the
central artery of Paris to the smallest hamlet in the mountains, composed of men
only waiting with enthusiastic eagerness for a sign, no more to express their
spontaneous urge for freedom, but their Revolutionary exaltation through obedi-
ent and fervent execution of orders from the centre, the seat of the enlightened
and infallible few.50
After Robespierre’s downfall, the split between liberal and totalitarian democ-
racy was finally concluded. For the liberal democrats or Thermidorians, the
Jacobin experience scared them away from any ideas of totally remaking
society. They were content with preserving the bourgeois conditions they had
already gained. Totalitarian democrats further radicalized toward socialism,
reaching a new stage with Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals.
While a minor episode in the revolution, Babeuf’s Conspiracy had a lasting
impact as it evolved from Jacobinism to communism:
Babeuf and Buonarroti discovered that the Jacobin half-way house was a
heart-break house. It was necessary to go the whole way towards a State-owned
and State-directed economy. The solution of the economic problem was the
condition of the Jacobin Republic of Virtue. The Thermidorian reaction learned
a similar lesson from Jacobin dictatorship, but drew the opposite conclusions:
property must become the rock of the social edifice, and social welfare must be
put outside the scope of state politics.51
What followed according to Talmon was a line of communist apostolic

succession. In the nineteenth century, Babeuf’s ideas were codified by his
collaborator Philippe Buonarroti in A History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for
Equality (1828). Buonarroti argued that achieving communism required a
disciplined vanguard organization, the violent seizure of power, a revolution-

ary dictatorship, and terror. After Buonarroti, Babuovist ideas were transmit-
ted to the insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, then from Karl Marx to
Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Talmon concluded that there was an unbroken line
of philosophical continuity from Rousseau all the way to communist totali-
tarianism: “Jacobins may have differed from the Babouvists, the Blanquists
from many of the secret societies in the first half of the nineteenth century,
the Communists from the Socialists, the Anarchists from all others, yet they
all belong to one religion.”52
Other arguments by Talmon relating to Marx, Blanqui, Rousseau, and the
French Revolution need not concern us here.53 However, it is worth pointing
out that Talmon’s case against the Radical Enlightenment is similar to that
found in the work of the eighteenth-century conservative thinker Edmund
Burke. In his polemics against the French Revolution, Burke said its radi-
calism could be traced back to the Enlightenment philosophes. He said that
the worst offender was Rousseau, whom he described as the “founder of
the philosophy of vanity.”54 Burke believed that the French revolutionaries
embraced a philosophical hubris that man was a rational being and the world
could be restructured according to the dictates of reason. Embracing these
godless ideas, the French proceeded to tear down time-honored institutions,
most particularly the Christian Church, which held man’s bestial passions in
check. As a result, the leveling demons of “abstract reason” and the Rights
of Man threatened to destroy civilization itself: “The levelers, therefore, only
change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society
by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the
ground.”55
Another point of agreement between Talmon and Burke is that their oppo-
sition to the French Revolution rests on a shared idealism and religious mor-
alism. This enables them to tell a simple story explaining why the revolution
failed. Neither of them looks at the material or social causes of the French
Revolution in any depth. Instead, they locate the cause of the Revolution in
the radical philosophes. Once the radicals were in power, they proceeded
to replace God with man; in their secular arrogance that it was possible to
change human nature, their plans inevitability ended in terror and tyranny.
While he is certainly not the first to draw connections between the French
and Russian Revolutions, Talmon’s scholarship far surpasses those of earlier
efforts. He said that the Dialectic of Saturn that spawned totalitarianism was
found in reason itself. His sweeping and uncompromising work paved the
way for others to reject communism as a species of Enlightenment reason. As
a result, Talmon cannot be overestimated when it comes to the development
of the new counter-Enlightenment project.
44 Chapter Three
D. TOTALITARIANISM REBORN
1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
As mentioned earlier, totalitarianism was challenged in the 1960s by the new
revisionists in academia. The social movements of the sixties also challenged
the Cold War mentality that made communism a straightforward anathema.
However, the following decade breathed new life and popularity into the
idea of totalitarianism with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago. In the waning days of the Cold War, anti-communism
renewed its ideological offensive to bury reason and revolution once and for
all. After the fall of the USSR, totalitarian theory reached its full development
as a counter-Enlightenment project with the publication of The Black Book
of Communism.
Born in the fortuitous year of 1917, the young Solzhenitsyn was brought
up in Christian Orthodoxy, but believed in the promises of the Bolshevik
revolution. It was his studies of Marxism as a young man that made him
into a left-wing anti-Stalinist. As a student at Rostov State University,
Solzhenitsyn and his friends avidly read Marx, Hegel, and Lenin. This led
him to doubt the validity of the Moscow Trials and conclude that Stalin had
corrupted Marxism.
As a loyal son of the revolution, Solzhenitsyn joined the Red Army
in 1941. He served as an artillery officer and rose to the rank of captain.
Solzhenitsyn fought with distinction and was awarded for his bravery. Yet his
socialist convictions were shaken during the war. At Bobruisk in Belorussia,
he watched in horror as captured Nazi collaborators were summarily pun-
ished.56 When the Red Army advanced into East Prussia, he was aghast as
soldiers took revenge against the local populace. Solzhenitsyn reported these
crimes to higher authorities, but nothing happened. As he recounted later, his
doubts about Soviet socialism continued to grow:
“Know thyself!” There is nothing that so aids-and assists the awakening of

omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions,
errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years,
whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the
cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards
and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire,
and I say: “So were we any better?”57
Writing to his friend Nikolai Vitkevic in February 1945, Solzhenitsyn criti-

cized not just the Red Army’s conduct of the war, but Stalin himself. This
led to his arrest by military intelligence on charges of making anti-Soviet
propaganda. Solzhenitsyn insisted that this was a terrible mistake and that he
was a believer in socialism. This did not dissuade the authorities and he was
sentenced to a term of eight years in the gulag.
Thanks to his academic background in physics, Solzhenitsyn spent the
first four years of his sentence in a sharashka or a special scientific research
facility near Moscow. There, he met a diverse array of prisoners that included
Christians, democrats, and Stalinists. In the first year of his imprisonment,
Solzhenitsyn still considered himself a Leninist. He argued over socialism
with Dmitri Panin, a Christian anti-communist. Solzhenitsyn also befriended
Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko, an old Bolshevik who had known Lenin personally.
However, Fastenko had largely disavowed the Soviet Union and Leninism.58
His time in the gulag caused Solzhenitsyn’s Marxist convictions to erode
and he sought solace in spirituality:
For my part, I was never able to get away from politics or my convictions. It is
true that I used to try to defend Marxism during the early years of my impris-
onment. But it turned out that I was incapable of it. There were such strong
arguments and such experienced people against me that I simply couldn’t. They
beat me every time. And so gradually I moved away from Marxism, and at the
sharashka I describe an intermediate position of scepticism, when I didn’t quite
believe in it any more. At all events, it was a most convenient position: I don’t
believe in anything, I don’t know anything, leave me alone. . . . Then, while still
at the sharashka, I began gradually to abandon this scepticism. In fact, I began
gradually to return to my old, original childhood concepts. Through reading
Dostoyevsky, actually . . . I began to move ever so slowly towards a position that
was in the first place idealist, as they call it, that is, of supporting the primacy
of the spiritual over the material, and secondly patriotic and religious. In other
words, I began to return slowly and gradually to all my former views.59
In his seventh year of imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn returned to his ances-

tral Orthodox faith. Following an operation, he was treated by Doctor
Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld, a Jew who had converted to Christianity.
Solzhenitsyn was curious and asked Kornfeld about his change of faith. The
next morning, he learned that the doctor was dead, having been killed by
some prisoners. It was at that moment when Solzhenitsyn converted to the
Orthodox faith.
Central to Solzhenitsyn’s newfound worldview was the fallen nature of
man. He believed that good and evil did not reside in either classes or states
but were found inside every single person. Salvation could only come from
within through individual faith in God. This meant he rejected what he
considered the Marxist credo of collective redemption by eliminating evil
classes. Solzhenitsyn believed that Marxist materialism ensured damnation
since it required active participation in the godless enterprise of revolution.
Therefore, socialism created a greater evil than what it set out to destroy:
46 Chapter Three
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world:
They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being).
It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to
constrict it within each person.
And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolu-
tions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with
them (and also fan, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well).
And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magni-
fied still more.60
After Stalin’s death and the beginning of Khrushchev’s reforms, Solzhenitsyn

was finally exonerated and freed from exile in 1956. He took a teaching job
south of Moscow, but spent his free time writing. Solzhenitsyn believed that
he had a moral duty to bear witness about life in the camps. Among his stories
was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the story of a gulag inmate’s life
during a regular day. Due to the continuing censorship, Solzhenitsyn did not
believe his work would ever be published.
However, he was emboldened after the Twenty-Second Congress of the
Communist Party in 1961. This event promised accelerated liberalization and
reforms. Solzhenitsyn took a chance and sent his Denisovich manuscript to
Aleksandr Tvardovsky, chief editor of the influential literary journal Novy
Mir. Tvardovsky loved the work, but he was unsure if the party would allow
its publication.
Yet Nikita Khrushchev was enamored by Solzhenitsyn’s book too. At two
Presidium meetings Denisovich was one of the main topics of discussion.
Khrushchev brushed aside the doubts of hard-liners and demanded its print-
ing as necessary for de-Stalinization: “There’s a Stalinist in each of you;
there’s even some of the Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”61 The
party granted official approval and the November 1962 issue of Novy Mir was
released, carrying One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The issue sold out
almost immediately and Solzhenitsyn was propelled into stardom.
However, the liberal atmosphere in the Soviet Union ended after
Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964. The new regime of Leonid Brezhnev wanted to
reimpose a harsh censorship and crush dissidents. Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer
Ward was denied publication by the Union of Writers unless he removed
anti-Soviet statements. He refused. Even as the space for free expression
evaporated, Solzhenitsyn grew defiant and condemned socialism outright:
“Are we, by chance, going to admit, comrades . . . that socialism itself is
inherently flawed?”62 Solzhenitsyn found that he was now harassed by the
KGB and his manuscripts were seized.
Denied the opportunity to publish in the USSR, he had The First Circle
and The Cancer Ward published in the West. This led the Union of Writers
to expel Solzhenitsyn from its ranks. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature, but was unable to receive it until 1974. Afterward,
Solzhenitsyn became an obsession for KGB leader Yuri Andropov, who
wanted to expel him from the country.63
During this period, Solzhenitsyn was feverishly writing The Gulag
Archipelago. In case he was arrested, Solzhenitsyn secretly sent a copy of
the manuscript to the West. Inside the Soviet Union, there were only three
copies of the draft, which the KGB wanted to confiscate. In 1973, the KGB
found one of the copies after interrogating Solzhenitsyn’s typist, Elizaveta
Voronyanskaya. Following her release, Voronyanskaya was found hanged in
her apartment. It is still unclear if she committed suicide or was murdered.
Once Solzhenitsyn heard about her death, he had The Gulag Archipelago
published in Paris. This was a final outrage to the Soviet leadership, who
arrested him. Eventually, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and
deported to West Germany in 1974.
Almost immediately after it was published, The Gulag Archipelago was
recognized as an instant classic. In three mammoth volumes, Solzhenitsyn
recounted the history of the gulag, its inner workings, and the suffering of its
inmates. In order to tell this tale, Solzhenitsyn used not only his own personal
experience, but official documents, the testimonies of 256 former prison-
ers, diaries, and extensive historical research. As a work of literature and an
exposé of the Soviet penal system, The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s
crowning achievement as a writer.
Yet as J. Arch Getty observed, Solzhenitsyn may be a brilliant artist, but he
was a terrible historian:
Solzhenitsyn makes no attempt to be analytical or to explain why events hap-

pen. He artfully weaves thousands of personal horror stories into a captivating
piece of subjective literature that brilliantly portrays the personal, psychologi-
cal effects of being repressed. . . . Solzhenitsyn’s political and moralistic point
of view tends to blur analytical categories. It makes no essential distinctions
between trials of political opponents, the suppression of armed uprisings, the
removal of derelict and criminal party administrators, attempts to impose liter-
ary norms, and murder by the police. All these are undifferentiated manifesta-
tions of repression or terror “from above,” despite the fact that they took place
decades apart and for different reasons.64
At an even deeper level, Solzhenitsyn is not revealing anything terribly new

about the gulag. Accounts about repression in the USSR had been a regular
occurrence in western literature for decades. As far back as the 1930s, Victor
48 Chapter Three
Serge and Ante Ciliga had written about Soviet prisons. In 1947, I Choose
Freedom by Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko was a bestseller. As will be
shown later, Kravchenko caused a massive stir in France in the late 1940s
not unlike Solzhenitsyn a generation later. An account of life in both Soviet
and Nazi camps, Under Two Dictators by Margarete Buber-Neumann was
published in 1949. Evgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind about
her eighteen years in the gulag was released in 1967. Furthermore, anti-
communist propaganda was regularly filled with accounts about suffering in
the camps.
It was not the originality of historical research that made Solzhenitsyn’s
work so impactful. One factor was the timing. The publication of The Gulag
Archipelago happened just as conservative retrenchment began. Sixties
radicalism had run out of steam and leftist activists were now questioning
the viability of socialism altogether. David Horowitz, then still a Marxist,
recalled that he found Solzhenitsyn hard to read since it challenged a lifetime
of political commitment: “I had grown up in an environment where the Soviet
Union was the focus of all progressive hopes and political efforts. My acute
sense of our complicity in these crimes made it difficult for me to read more
than a few pages of Solzhenitsyn’s text at a single sitting.”65 Many other
activists read Solzhenitsyn and were converted like anti-communist Pauls on
the road to Damascus.
A second factor was Solzhenitsyn himself. As a gulag survivor and devout
Christian, Solzhenitsyn’s unique identity gave immense credibility to his
condemnation of communism. In addition, his voice helped bolster the case
against easing relations and détente with the USSR. Solzhenitsyn spoke
music to conservative ears when he warned about the inherent dangers of
international communism:
[The goal of] Communist ideology is to destroy your social order. This has
been their aim for 125 years and it has never changed; only the methods have
changed a little. When there is détente, peaceful co-existence, and trade, they
will still insist: the ideological war must continue! And what is ideological war?
It is a concentration of hatred, a continued repetition of the oath to destroy the
Western world.66
Finally, the promotion of Solzhenitsyn served to mask the actual diversity

of dissident views in the USSR. As an anti-communist, Solzhenitsyn was
the ideal dissident in western eyes, representing the views of all those who
suffered in the Soviet Union. In actuality, Soviet dissidents ranged from liber-
als like Andrei Sakharov; socialists such as Yuli Daniel, Andrei Sinyavsky,
and Varlam Shalamov; reform communists like Roy and Zhores Medvedev;
there were also fascists, anarchists, Trotskyists, and Maoists. Upholding
Solzhenitsyn made it easier to insinuate that all socialists stood in lockstep

with the Soviet Communist Party. As Andrew Smith said in his study of
Maoist dissidence in the Eastern Bloc, this made it easier to promote capital-
ism as the only alternative to communism: “The histories accessible to the
general public are the stories of men like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Where
is the history of those that fought so hard, often losing freedom and liveli-
hood, to oppose the regimes within their respective nations with the message
of communism?”67
While Solzhenitsyn was welcomed by anti-communists, he was dis-
gusted by the Western world. Solzhenitsyn believed that the West offered no
alternative for Russia. Following in the footsteps of the nineteenth century
Slavophiles, he argued that Russia should draw upon its own unique cultural
and spiritual heritage, which was untouched by godless materialism. He
dreamt of a Russia that had given up on Marxism, a land filled with happy
peasants under the rule of a God-ordained czar.
Like the USSR, he believed that the West was infected with the same ratio-
nalist and godless philosophy that promised earthly happiness. In his 1978
Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn condemned both East and
West for embracing this Enlightenment materialism:
I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born dur-
ing the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the
Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could
be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed
and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could
also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything
that exists.
As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made

itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation by socialism and
then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say that “communism is
naturalized humanism.”
This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same
stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of
socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibil-
ity, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictator-
ships; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach.
This is typical of the Enlightenment in the 18th Century and of Marxism. Not
by coincidence all of communism’s meaningless pledges and oaths are about
Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an
ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and
today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.68
50 Chapter Three
Naturally, Solzhenitsyn shared Talmon’s belief that the Jacobins with their
radical Enlightenment worldview served as the model for the Bolsheviks. At
a speech commemorating the royalist and Catholic counterrevolutionaries of
the Vendée who rose up against the First French Republic, Solzhenitsyn con-
demned two centuries of revolutions for humanistic folly and mass murder:
I would not wish a “great revolution” upon any nation. Only the arrival
of Thermidor prevented the eighteenth-century revolution from destroying
France. But the revolution in Russia was not restrained by any Thermidor
as it drove our people on the straight path to a bitter end, to an abyss, to the
depths of ruin.
It is a pity that there is no one here today who could speak of the suffering
endured in the depths of China, Cambodia, or Vietnam, and could describe the
price they had to pay for revolution.
One might have thought that the experience of the French revolution would have
provided enough of a lesson for the rationalist builders of “the people’s happi-
ness” in Russia. But no, the events in Russia were grimmer yet, and incompa-
rably more enormous in scale. Lenin’s Communists and International Socialists
studiously reenacted on the body of Russia many of the French revolution’s
cruelest methods—only they possessed a much greater and more systematic
level of organizational control than the Jacobins.69
Considering his belief in the long unbroken and bloody history of material-
ism, Solzhenitsyn doubted the existence of Stalinism as a deviation from
communism. He viewed the term to be a deflection utilized by Trotskyists
and other leftists to avoid blaming Leninism and their whole humanist ideol-
ogy. Ironically, this led Solzhenitsyn to agree with Maoists and Stalinists who
considered Stalin to be the worthy heir of Lenin:
But close study of our modern history shows that there never was any such
thing as Stalinism, (either as a doctrine, or as a path of national life, or as a state
system), and official circles in our country, as well as the Chinese leaders, have
every right to insist on this. Stalin was a very consistent and faithful—if also
very untalented—heir to the spirit of Lenin’s teaching.70
Throughout The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn judged all Bolsheviks and

Marxists complicit in Stalin’s crimes. He had nothing but contempt for the
communists who were consumed by the purges, whom he thinks got just what
they deserved:
Apropos of the orthodox Communists, Stalin was necessary, for such a purge as
that, yes, but a Party like that was necessary too: the majority of those in power,
up to the very moment of their own arrest, were pitiless in arresting others,
obediently destroyed their peers in accordance with those same instructions and
handed over to retribution any friend or comrade-in-arms of yesterday. And all
the big Bolsheviks, who now wear martyrs’ halos, managed to be the execution-
ers of other Bolsheviks (not even taking into account how all of them in the first
place had been the executioners of non-Communists). Perhaps 1937 was needed
in order to show how little their whole ideology was worth—that ideology of
which they boasted so enthusiastically, turning Russia upside down, destroying
its foundations, trampling everything it held sacred underfoot, that Russia where
they themselves had never been threatened by such retribution. The victims of
the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1946 never conducted themselves so despicably as
the leading Bolsheviks when the lightning struck them. If you study in detail the
whole history of the arrests and trials of 1936 to 1938, the principal revulsion
you feel is not against Stalin and his accomplices, but against the humiliatingly
repulsive defendants—nausea at their spiritual baseness after their former pride
and implacability.71
Rarely does Solzhenitsyn have a kind word to say about any communists
imprisoned in the gulag. He begrudgingly says about the Trotskyist prisoners:
“I do not know whether they were prepared for that total annihilation which
Stalin had allotted them, or whether they still thought that it would all end
with jokes and reconciliation. In any case, they were heroic people.”72
Solzhenitsyn’s worldview meant that he naturally sympathized with the
elite. As already discussed, he was especially fond of White émigrés, who
were drawn from the czarist nobility. In the gulag, Solzhenitsyn saw all
Bolsheviks as uncouth bloodthirsty monsters, but considered the White
inmates he met to be naturally decent: “I do not know what kind of White
Guards they were in the Civil War, either of them, whether they were among
the exceptional few who hung every tenth worker without trial and whipped
the peasants, or whether they were the other kind, the soldierly majority.”73
For Solzhenitsyn, the moral superiority and stoicism of the Whites was a tes-
tament to their aristocratic class background and refinement: “And here is the
kind of self-control this meant, the sort of thing we have forgotten because of
the anathema we have heaped upon the aristocracy, we who whine at every
petty misfortune and every petty pain.”74
His reputation as a moralist and victim of totalitarianism notwithstanding,
Solzhenitsyn did not object at all to rightwing dictatorships. For instance,
he believed that Francisco Franco was a good Christian who saved Spain.
In 1976, Solzhenitsyn visited the Valley of the Fallen outside of Madrid that
commemorated Franco’s victory. This monument was built by the slave labor
of defeated Republicans. Solzhenitsyn did not see any parallel to his own time
in the gulag here, but merely Christian justice at work:
52 Chapter Three
This equality of both sides, the equality of the fallen before God, made a pro-
found impression on me. This is the result of the Christian side having won the
war! Back home, Satan’s side had won, and for sixty years had been trampling
and spitting on the other side, nobody uttering so much as a syllable about equal-
ity of the dead, at least.75
After the fall of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn was finally able to return home in
1994. Russia’s new rulers were too enamored of capitalism to pay him much
attention though. Yet Solzhenitsyn’s lasting legacy was not his premodern
program for a czarist restoration, but serving as a moralizing propagandist
who advanced the counter-Enlightenment project.
2. Leszek Kołakowski
To successfully claim that the whole of Marxism was rooted in a totalitar-
ian philosophical enterprise, the counter-Enlightenment needed to deploy
its own philosophical weapons. The most famous example of this was
Leszek Kołakowski’s magnum opus Main Currents of Marxism, where he
claimed that the flaws of scientific socialism lay in its rationalist philosophy.
Kołakowski concluded that Marxism’s “Promethean” faith in the ability of
humanity to change the world made it “the greatest fantasy of our century.”76
Kołakowski himself began his political life as a Marxist. In postwar
Poland, he joined the ruling party, not to advance his career, but because he
sincerely wanted to construct socialism. As one of Poland’s most promising
young philosophers, Kołakowski championed the humanistic values of the
young Marx against Stalinist dogmatism. After the Polish October of 1956, he
had hopes that the reformist leadership of Władysław Gomułka would make
meaningful changes.
He was disappointed when Poland’s liberal era proved short-lived. On
the tenth anniversary of the Polish October in 1966, Kołakowski delivered a
speech that led to his expulsion from the party. During the student protests
of 1968, Kołakowski lost his job at Warsaw University and was prevented
from teaching in Poland. He was further disgusted when the party mobilized
anti-Semitic rhetoric and images against the protest movement. That same
year, Kołakowski and his family emigrated, eventually settling in England.
By the early 1970s, he abandoned any identification with Marxism.
However, Kołakowski wanted to explain what had gone wrong with
Marxism. In 1976, he finished Main Currents of Marxism, a three-volume
work tracing its origins from distant beginnings in ancient philosophy
through Hegel and Marx, and stretching forward to the Second International,
Russian Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and a host of other figures and
movements. Kołakowski’s argument began by observing that throughout its
long history, philosophy searched for answers to timeless questions such as

the origin and nature of human suffering and how to achieve a world free of
alienation. Whatever their differences, both religious and secular thinkers
wanted to return humanity to a lost golden age: “It appears in fact that the
theory in question, together with the paradigmatic image of a lost paradise, is
an unchanging feature of man’s speculation about himself, assuming different
forms in different cultures but equally capable of finding expression.”77
In his search for this utopia, Kołakowski said that Marx was not unique.
What made Marx different was that he was a “German philosopher,” who
followed Hegel and the whole tradition of German classical philosophy with
its quest for absolute and universalist solutions to social contradictions.78 At
one point, Kołakowski described Marx as a child of the Enlightenment who
burns with a “Promethean faith in human dignity rooted in freedom.”79 This
was an apt metaphor since Marx admired the Greek Titan Prometheus, who
rebelled against Zeus by stealing fire, then bestowed it to humanity, allowing
for progress and civilization. According to Kołakowski, Marx considered the
working class to be a modern Prometheus that struggles for the liberation of
humanity: “Salvation, for Marx, is man’s salvation of himself; not the work
of God or Nature, but that of a collective Prometheus who, in principle, is
capable of achieving absolute command over the world he lives in. In this
sense man’s freedom is his creativity, the march of a conqueror overcoming
both nature and himself.”80
It is specifically this a priori belief in the “self-deification of mankind” that
Kołakowski considers to be the fatal flaw of Marxism.81 Since Marxism does
not accept the fallen and limited nature of man, this means its promises of the
“Promethean” utopia of communism is impossible to achieve in this world:
The idea that the existing world is so totally corrupt that it is unthinkable to
improve it and that, precisely for this reason, the world that will succeed it will
bring the fullness of the perfection and the ultimate liberation, this idea is one
of the most monstrous aberrations of the human spirit. Rather, common sense
whispers: the more corrupt the existing world, the longer, harder and more
uncertain the road to the dream realm of perfection. Of course, this aberration is
not an invention of our time, but it must be recognized that, besides the religious
thought which opposes all temporal values to the force of supernatural grace, is
much less abominable than in the worldly doctrines which certify to us that we
can ensure our salvation by leaping with a single leap from the abyss of hell to
the heights of heaven. Such a revolution will never happen.82
While Marxism put on the airs of science and rationalism, Kołakowski said
that it functioned more as a substitute religion and a false God.
Since the Marxist vision of communism was a chimera, Kołakowski consid-
ered it inevitable that the Bolshevik Revolution would end in totalitarianism.
54 Chapter Three
He saw a direct line of continuity from Lenin to Stalin to the present Soviet
leadership with their flawed visions of a communist utopia. When it came to
Trotsky, he saw no alternative program, but just another totalitarian architect:
“Stalinism was the natural and obvious continuation of the system of govern-
ment established by Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky refused to recognize this fact
and persuaded himself that Stalin’s despotism bore no relation to Lenin’s. . . .
What we have here is not merely the tragedy of an epigone, but that of a revo-
lutionary despot entangled in a snare of his own making.”83 For Kołakowski,
the Soviet Union and communism could never be nontotalitarian.
Kołakowski’s claims about the inherent totalitarian character of Marxism
had many detractors on the left. Among them was the historian Edward
P. Thompson, who wrote a lengthy letter to him in the Socialist Register.
Thompson reminded Kołakowski that after 1956, they had both abandoned
Stalinism without disavowing their Marxism. Now Thompson pleaded
with his former comrade to remember that commitment and return to the
socialist left:
We rejected—as I still reject—any description of Communism or of

Communist-governed societies which defines these in terms of their ruling
ideologies and the institutions of their ruling élites, and which excludes by the
very terms of its definition any appraisal of the conflicts characteristic to them,
of the alternative meanings, values, traditions and potentials which they may
contain. And I make this point the more strongly, since I have recently noted
with astonishment that you yourself, in the last year or two, appear to have been
falling back on such conditioned liberal definitions . . . We refused to disavow
“Communism” because Communism was a complex noun which included
Leszek Kołakowski.84
In his response, Kołakowski reaffirmed his position and accused Thompson

of remaining trapped in utopian thinking:
Absolute equality can be set up only within a despotic system of rule which
implies privileges, i.e., destroys equality; total freedom means anarchy and anar-
chy results in the domination of the physically strongest, i.e., total freedom turns
into its opposite; efficiency as a supreme value calls again for despotism and
despotism is economically inefficient above a certain level of technology. If I
repeat these old truisms this is because they still seem to go unnoticed in utopian
thinking; and this is why nothing in the world is easier than writing utopias.85
Like other counter-Enlightenment thinkers, Kołakowski condemns Marxism

for its rationalism. Yet for all its seeming comprehensive nature and erudi-
tion, the conclusions of Main Currents of Marxism is merely the old religious
teaching of original sin dressed up in a philosophical guise. It is only in a
heavenly paradise where communism is possible, but here on earth, the cor-
rupted nature of man means it can only end in a totalitarian inferno.
3. François Furet
The counter-Enlightenment needed to discredit not only the Russian
Revolution, but also radical revolutions more generally. Most especially,
this required undermining the Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy on the French
Revolution. The Jacobin-Marxist position hailed the French Revolution as a
bourgeois revolution that laid the historical and theoretical groundwork for
future proletarian revolutions. The attack on this orthodoxy fell to the histo-
rian François Furet. He concluded that Jacobin revolutionary violence had
nothing to do with achieving bourgeois and liberal goals, but led to terror,
totalitarianism, and ruin.
A former communist, Furet intimately understood the importance of
the French Revolution to Marxists. As a bourgeois revolution, the French
Revolution of 1789 and Jacobinism served as historical precedents for the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and Bolshevism. As Furet recalled, the French
Communist Party (PCF) considered itself heir to this republican and revolu-
tionary legacy:
A perusal of L’Humanité reveals numerous references to the Jacobin example,

even during the most sectarian periods of the history of the French Communist
Party. This is not surprising if we think of Jacobinism as a precedent to
Bolshevism in the category of terrorist dictatorships exercised in the name of
the people. Until condemned by historians of the second half of the twentieth
century as “totalitarian democracy,” Jacobin democracy was celebrated either as
the dictatorship of public safety or as the ephemeral prefiguration of the power
of the people mobilized against its foreign and domestic enemies. In both cases,
especially the latter, the precedent of 1793 was essential to the legitimation of
the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as conceived by Lenin—the Robespierre of
the proletariat—and carried out by means of terror from 1918 onward.86
Many prominent historians of the French Revolution, such as Albert Mathiez,

Albert Soboul, Maurice Dommanget, Maurice Agulhon, Claude Mazauric,
and Denis Richet (Furet’s coauthor on La Révolution Française) broadly
shared this view and were members of the PCF at one time or another.
Furet first challenged the Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy in the 1960s by
drawing upon the work of the classical liberal historian Alfred Cobban. In
two works, The Myth of the French Revolution (1955) and later in The Social
Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964), Cobban disputed the Marxist
“social interpretation” of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution on four main points.
One: he argued that by 1789 that France was no longer a feudal society since
56 Chapter Three
capitalism already dominated the countryside. Second: he claimed that the

most active members of the Third Estate were not capitalists, but profession-
als, officeholders, and lawyers. In other words, there was no revolutionary
bourgeoisie leading the people against the aristocracy and King Louis XVI.
Third: the end of the Old Regime was largely accomplished by 1791, which
meant that the popular mobilizations of the sansculottes and peasantry were
largely meaningless to this process. Four: the revolution actually had little
impact on the future development of capitalism in France.87
Furet did not adopt all of Cobban’s positions, however. He still considered
the French Revolution to be a bourgeois one. In La Révolution Française
(1965), he described the bourgeoisie as “faithful to its liberating mission.”88
Furet largely agreed with Cobban that the revolution’s goals had been
achieved by 1791. Afterward, he considered Jacobinism to be a sort of his-
torical accident that led to “le dérapage de la révolution” or the revolution
skidding off course.89 He concluded that Jacobinism and the Reign of Terror
were not historically necessary to securing bourgeois gains. The revolution
only returned to its proper course during the Thermidorian Reaction.
Both Claude Mazauric and Albert Soboul recognized the implications of
Furet’s liberal revisionism. They understood that his arguments went beyond
the French Revolution and were part of a broader attack on Marxism, popular
struggles, and socialism. According to Mazauric:
Their [i.e. Furet’s and Richet’s] allusions, explicit and more frequently
implicit, to the Bolsheviks, to the contemporary history of the USSR and of the
Communist parties, and to socialist and Marxist historiography, are sufficiently
numerous to ensure that nobody can be accused of being unfair by pointing out
that their hostile prejudices have led them on in just the way they accuse others
of being led.90
Mazauric objected to Furet not solely on political grounds, but faulted him
in other ways. He noted that La Révolution Française failed to acknowledge
that the revolution only succeeded due to the alliance between the bourgeoisie
and the masses. Mazauric said Furet’s thesis of “le dérapage de la révolution”
rested on faulty assumptions that the French Revolution was fundamentally
liberal. Rather, the war with foreign powers grew out of the radical impetus
embedded within the whole revolutionary process: “Can one affirm that the
war is at the origin of the so-called dérapage of the Revolution if it is almost
a natural component of it?”91
Albert Soboul defended Jacobinism not as a dérapage that was detrimental
to the revolution’s outcome, but essential to its ultimate victory:
“A skid” implies that this intervention was neither indispensable to the success
of the bourgeois revolution nor fundamentally motivated by it. . . . Our authors
don’t ask themselves if it is not precisely in this period, which they call “a skid,”
that the bourgeoisie was able to exterminate all the forms of counterrevolution
and thus render possible, in the long run, the liberal system that prevailed defini-
tively after 1794.92
Furet responded to both Mazauric and Soboul in an essay, “The Revolutionary

Catechism.” He said that the terms of their debate were not over historiog-
raphy, but the relationship between the French and Russian Revolutions.
Since a socialist revolution followed a bourgeois one, the Bolsheviks used
the Jacobins to justify their actions as historically necessary: “After 1917,
the French Revolution became more than just the matrix of probabilities that
could and would engender another permanently liberating revolution. . . .
It had become the mother of an actual event, and its offspring had a name:
October 1917, and more generally, the Russian Revolution.”93
Considering these stakes, Furet attacked the whole concept of bourgeois
revolution as utilized by Mazauric and Soboul. He argued that they used
1789’s status as a bourgeois revolution to glorify past upheavals as applicable
to the present. Furet said that this grand scheme of history was abusive to
the truth. He contended that if the concept of bourgeois revolution was to be
employed to explain events, then its applicability must be limited. He found
that bourgeois revolution as a category was wanting in understanding the
course of the French Revolution since those goals were largely achieved by
1791. The concept could not explain events skidding off course afterward.
Furet said Jacobinism with its irrational fear of enemies bore no relation to
reality and took on a life of its own: “For, in the main, Jacobin and terror-
ist ideology functioned autonomously, unrelated to political and military
circumstance, expressed in hyperbole all the more inclusive as politics was
subsumed under morality and a sense of reality faded.”94 The inference of his
argument was that the importance of ideology trumped social and economic
factors; these factors were integral to the Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy and
needed to be downgraded. For now, Furet’s thoughts on the primacy of revo-
lutionary ideology were more suggestive hints than a worked-out synthesis.
Furet’s ideas were largely ignored in the 1960s since the Communists
remained hegemonic on the French left. However, the PCF’s authority was
weakened after the student protests of May 1968. Since the PCF refused to
support the students, activists looked to Maoist groups as alternatives. Yet
within a few short years, the Maoist organizations themselves imploded.
This radical burnout coincided with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago, which sold an astonishing 600,000 copies in France.
Among these readers were ex-Maoists, who saw Solzhenitsyn’s work as a
58 Chapter Three
revelation on the evils of communism. A loose movement of former leftists

known as the nouveaux philosophes, which included Christian Jambet, André
Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner, Bernard Kouchner, Alain Finkielkraut, and
Bernard-Henri Lévy joined together around a shared anti-communism. The
nouveaux philosophes adamantly considered the French Revolution to be the
Russian Revolution’s totalitarian father. According to Lévy: “Philosophy has
in fact held power at least twice in the West: in 1793 first, in the Committee
of Public Safety, which held the Encyclopaedia in one hand and the guillo-
tine in the other; then in 1917, in the Marxist brains which, claiming to give
birth to the good society, brought death to the world. The dream was not born
yesterday, then, but it is established that it always turns into a blood bath.”95
Within a short time, the nouveaux philosophes caused a massive shift in
French intellectual life as the Jacobin-Marxist heritage was replaced by the
new Counter-Enlightenment. As Perry Anderson put it: “Paris today is the
capital of European intellectual reaction.”96
From the very beginning, Furet identified himself with this new
anti-totalitarian movement. He was a frequent writer for Le Nouvel
Observateur that promoted Solzhenitsyn’s work. Furet was heartened by the
nouveaux philosophes’ rejection of Marxism and the French Revolution. In
1977, he published an essay entitled “The French Revolution is Over” where
he used Solzhenitsyn and the gulag to link the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks as
part of the same totalitarian endeavor:
In 1920, Mathiez justified Bolshevik violence by the French precedent, in the

name of comparable circumstances. Today the Gulag is leading to a rethinking
of the Terror precisely because the two undertakings are seen as identical. The
two revolutions remain connected; but while fifty years ago they were system-
atically absolved on the basis of excuses related to “circumstances,” that is,
external phenomena that had nothing to do with the nature of the two revolu-
tions, they are today, by contrast, accused of being, consubstantially, systems of
meticulous constraint over men’s bodies and minds.97
Thus, there was a line of totalitarian continuity from the French to the Russian
Revolutions. This meant that the gulag found its precursor in the guillotine.
The Cheka and Stalin’s purges were direct descendants of the Committee of
Public Safety. The universalist and rationalist worldviews of Jacobinism and
Bolshevism both spawned terror. In the nouveaux philosophes thinking of the
time: revolution ends in Pol Pot and the Killing Fields.
Now, Furet fully developed his earlier suggestive remarks on the primacy
of Jacobin ideology. He utilized the work of the right-wing historian Augustin
Cochin who looked at the role of the philosophes in the French Revolution.
Cochin argued that the philosophes were filled with rationalist fantasies,
but they exercised ideological hegemony over French intellectuals. During

the French Revolution, the Jacobins shared the philosophe belief in abstract
reason. They used this ideological fanaticism to manipulate the sansculottes
and inaugurate the Terror. Therefore, Enlightenment ideology ended up
becoming a material force once its frenzy was grasped by the mob. As Cochin
concluded: “Before the bloody terror of 1793, there was, from 1765 to 1780,
a dry terror whose Committee of Public Safety was the Encyclopedie and
whose Robespierre was d’Alembert.”98
Following Cochin, Furet argued that the main features of Bolshevism could
be traced back to Jacobinism and the salons of the philosophes:
It becomes clear that [Cochin] put his finger on a central feature, not only of the
French Revolution but of what it shared with later revolutions, if one realises
that he described in advance many traits of Lenin’s Bolshevism. It is true, of
course, that Lenin, unlike Robespierre, was able to work out in advance his own
theory of the role of ideology and the political machine. But then his theory was
patterned, at least in part, on the Jacobin example.99
Furet’s liberal offensive against Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy also involved

adopting the historical schema developed by the nineteenth century thinker
Alexis de Tocqueville. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856),
Tocqueville argued that the French Revolution was simply the acceleration
of an ongoing process of modernization, centralization, and democratization
that began long before under the Bourbons. However, the Jacobins were so
blinded by ideology that they failed to observe these gradual changes. Based
on this interpretation, Furet argued that 1789 was part of the basic continu-
ity of French history, not the foundation of a new society by the revolution-
ary bourgeoisie: “Tocqueville shows that the Revolution was the crowning
point of the work of the kings of France and that Robespierre and even more
Bonaparte were the true heirs of Louis XI and Louis XIV. The Revolution
therefore did not represent a break but, on the contrary, a continuity, contrary
to its own idea of itself.”100 Not only was there no radical break in France, but
the revolution had been historically unnecessary to the process of capitalist
modernization. By the time of the French Revolution’s bicentennial in 1989,
Furet felt he could safely proclaim that the revolution was finally dead.
After the collapse of the USSR, Furet gave his own postmortem on pro-
letarian revolution and communism in The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea
of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Furet argued that communism was
based on the same illusions as Jacobinism and ended in much the same way.
He also offered some thoughts on the totalitarian relationship between fas-
cism and communism, noting that both movements were born in the mass
violence of World War I and possessed the shared goal of destroying liberal
60 Chapter Three
democracy. Communism and fascism were joined together as yin and yang
with their violence feeding off each other. Eric Hobsbawm called Furet’s
book “a belated product of the Cold War era.”101
Furet’s claims that communist and fascist violence were necessarily
linked brings him close to positions advanced by the conservative German
historian Ernst Nolte. As will be shown in the following section, Nolte saw
Nazi violence as a defensive reaction to Bolshevik atrocities. Furet praised
Nolte for having broken with “anti-fascist” taboos that refused to compare
Nazism and communism. He agreed with Nolte that “the universalist extrem-
ism of Bolshevism provokes the extremism of the particular in Nazism” as a
response.102 Despite their common ground on the totalitarian links between
fascism and communism, the two historians disagreed on three major points.
Furet maintained a distance from Nolte’s suggestion that the Nazi murder of
Jews contained a “rational kernel” as defensive violence against communist
terror to be “shocking and false.”103 He also believed Nolte’s insistence on
Nazi anti-Bolshevism meant he erased the uniquely German sources for
Hitler. Finally, Furet wondered if Nolte’s insistence on the reactive character
of Nazism was an effort to exonerate the Third Reich by solely indicting the
Soviet Union as a greater evil.
Shortly before he died in 1997, Furet was slated to write the introduction to
The Black Book of Communism. The editors correctly recognized the crucial
role that the French historian had played in the new counter-Enlightenment
project. Furet had clearly understood that the stakes of Jacobin-Marxist
orthodoxy was not just a historical debate on 1789, but were arguments on
the necessity for proletarian revolution and socialism. By attacking this com-
munist canon, Furet delegitimized the whole idea of revolution as not merely
unnecessary, but as a form of rationalist psychosis that leads to totalitar-
ian insanity.
4. Ernst Nolte
To forever discredit communism, the counter-Enlightenment project needed
to go further than just asserting its totalitarian identity with fascism. Rather,
communism needed to be painted as objectively worse. That mission was
undertaken by Ernst Nolte in the Historikerstreit or “historians’ dispute”
that dominated West German intellectual life in the 1980s. Nolte’s position
claimed that Nazism was a lesser evil when set against the Soviet Union and
communism. This was not only a form of historical revisionism, but implic-
itly rehabilitated fascism.
Nolte’s relationship with the philosopher Martin Heidegger helps to
explain his soft spot for Nazism. While a student at the University of Freiburg
in the 1940s, Nolte studied under Heidegger and they became personal
friends. When the war ended, Heidegger was considered a wanted criminal
by the Allies due to his support for the Third Reich. However, Nolte helped
his mentor evade capture for a time. Later in life, Nolte justified Heidegger’s
membership in the Nazi party on anti-communist grounds: “Insofar as
Heidegger resisted the attempt at the [Communist] solution, he, like count-
less others, was historically right. . . . In committing himself to the [National
Socialist] solution perhaps he became a ‘fascist.’ But in no way did that make
him historically wrong from the outset.”104
Nolte’s own work on fascism bore the influence of Heidegger’s philoso-
phy. When Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Three Faces of Fascism) was
published in 1963, it was acclaimed by scholars as a groundbreaking study
on the history of fascism. Utilizing a “metapolitical dimension” approach to
history, he prioritized great ideas which acted as commanding spiritual forces
that permeated all aspects of society. Nolte saw fascism as one of these great
ideas, since it was a product of the political, cultural, and ideological condi-
tions of Europe in the early twentieth century: “we cannot do otherwise than
call the era of the world wars an era of fascism.”105
In his work, Nolte looked at three fascist movements—German National
Socialism, Italian Fascism, and Action Française—under a comparative
lens. Even though these movements originated in different national contexts,
Nolte said they possessed common intellectual traits, which made it possible
to arrive at a definition of a generic form of fascism. Nolte defined fascism
as a rejection of the modern world, making it anti-liberal, anti-communist,
anti-bourgeois, and antidemocratic.
In a complex argument, Nolte said that fascism must be understood on
three separate levels. One level was the political where fascism was primar-
ily determined by its opposition to Marxism. A second level was sociological
where fascism was opposed to bourgeois values. The third level was fas-
cism’s “resistance to transcendence.”
Nolte’s usage of transcendence is where his intellectual debt to Heidegger
is most readily apparent. For Heidegger, transcendence contains universalist
and modern ideologies such as democracy and communism that destroy tra-
ditional social bonds. Nolte argued that fascism’s resistance to transcendence
took on two forms. The first involved resistance to “practical transcendence,”
which meant opposing trends toward material progress, technological change,
secularization, egalitarianism, democratization, and social advancement since
they aimed to liberate humanity from traditional societies. According to
Nolte, the Soviet Union’s industrial power and the egalitarian ideology of
communism made it into the very epitome of “practical transcendence.” The
rationalist USSR showcased the terrifying possibility of humanity traveling
beyond its limits into the hitherto forbidden realm of the divine. As an exam-
ple, Nolte pointed to the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s space flight in 1961.106
62 Chapter Three
The second type was “theoretical transcendence,” which meant championing

Enlightenment reason and optimism because they undermine premodern and
backward conditions. Fascists do not just resist transcendence, but they long
for their own radical revolution to create a new organic order.
Charles Maurras (leader of Action Française) and Adolf Hitler both viewed
the Enlightenment and modernity as two forms of “anti-nature” which ruined
traditional institutions:
The most central of Maurras’ ideas have been seen to penetrate to this level. By
“monotheism” and “antinature” he did not imply a political process: he related
these terms to the tradition of Western philosophy and religion, and left no doubt
that for him they were adjuncts not only of Rousseau’s notion of liberty but also
of the Christian Gospels and Parmenides’ concept of being. It is equally obvious
that he regarded the unity of world economics, technology, science, and eman-
cipation merely as another and more recent form of this “antinature.” It was not
difficult to find a place for Hitler’s ideas as a cruder and more recent expres-
sion of this schema. Maurras’ and Hitler’s real enemy was seen to be “freedom
toward the infinite” which, intrinsic in the individual and a reality in evolution,
threatens to destroy the familiar and the beloved. From all this it begins to be
apparent what is meant by “transcendence.”107
According to Nolte, Hitler believed the Jews embodied the transcendence of

modernity or the “historical process itself.”108 Since the Nazis saw the Jews as
a mortal threat, racial war and genocide were built into their worldview from
the very beginning: “Auschwitz was as firmly embedded in the principles of
the National Socialist race doctrine as the fruit in the seed, and many a man
who found the fruit too bitter was fertilizing the soil.”109
The historical understanding of Three Faces of Fascism is superior to
Nolte’s later work in two ways. First, he is aware of the precedents in
European culture, philosophy, and history for Nazi racism. He observed
that young fascists found the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche particularly
appealing with its talk of a new race of supermen who would dominate the
world and exterminate weaker races. In fact, Nolte said that Nietzsche’s
worldview was more genocidal than that of Hitler: “Many decades in
advance. Nietzsche provided the political, radical anti-Marxism of fascism
with its original spiritual image, an image of which even Hitler never quite
showed himself the equal.”110 Second: Nolte sees fascism not as a defensive
response to communist evil, but as a continuation of Nietzsche’s aristocratic
rebellion against the French Revolution, democracy, and socialism.111
Despite its groundbreaking nature, Three Faces of Fascism suffers from a
number of drawbacks. Like others in the counter-Enlightenment, Nolte sees
ideas as the primary factor in history. His understanding of fascism largely
focuses on the ideas of Maurras, Mussolini, and Hitler. When it comes to
the relationship between industrial capitalists and fascists in Germany, Nolte

downplays any connection: “The German industrialists emerge, therefore,
unconvicted, so far as the actual question of financing Hitler is concerned.
With respect to the more essential question of moral responsibility, they
appear as guilty and not guilty at the same time, although not on the same
level.”112
His identification of fascism with the ideas of its main leaders leads Nolte
to a bizarre conclusion that the whole movement effectively ended once they
died. For instance, the spell Hitler exercised over his followers was abruptly
broken with his death and all Nazis were transformed back into normal
Germans: “After the Führer’s death the core of leadership of the National
Socialist state snapped back, like a steel spring wound up too long, to its
original position and became a body of well-meaning and cultured Central
Europeans.”113 Nolte’s approach effectively absolves fascist militants and the
upper classes who supported them of any responsibility for their crimes. Nor
can he explain the continued existence of fascist tendencies after 1945.
At the time Nolte wrote Three Faces of Fascism, there was little indication
to the outside world of his later ideological evolution. In the coming years,
Nolte argued that the crimes of Nazism needed to be viewed not as unique
evils, but relativized and historicized. He said that enough time had passed
since 1945 for the Third Reich to be studied as dispassionately as other areas
of history so that Germans could recognize the good alongside the bad. In a
series of articles, lectures and books, Nolte said that Nazi Germany should
not be wholly demonized:
The demonisation of the Third Reich should be opposed. We must speak of

demonisation when the Third Reich is denied any humaneness, which means
that everything human is finite and thus can be neither completely good nor
completely bad, neither completely light nor completely dark. A thorough
investigation and penetrating comparison will not eliminate the singularity of
the Third Reich, but they will make it appear nevertheless as a part of the history
of mankind which not only reproduced traits of the past in a very concentrated
form, but which at the same time anticipated future developments and tangled
manifest problems of the present. The Third Reich, too, can and must be an
object of historical investigation, investigation which is not beyond politics but
which is yet not merely the servant of politics.114
When it came to the extermination of the Jews, Nolte argued that Germans did
not bear any special guilt for it. He said that the Bolsheviks began a “European
Civil War” in 1917 with their class genocide. This form of violence was not
only unprecedented, but had its origins in the French Revolution, which the
communists perfected.115 The Nazi racial genocide was a defensive—albeit
regrettable—response to the greater violence of Bolshevism:
64 Chapter Three
It is a notable shortcoming that the literature about National Socialism does

not know or does not want to admit to what degree all the deeds—with the
sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists
later committed had already been described in the voluminous literature of the
1920s: mass deportations and executions, torture, death camps, the extermi-
nation of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public
demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought
to be “enemies.”
It is likely that many of these reports were exaggerated. It is certain that the
“White terror” also committed terrible deeds, even though its program con-
tained no analogy to the “extermination of the bourgeoisie.” Nonetheless, the
following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National
Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and
their ilk considered themselves to be potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Was
the Gulag Archipelago not primary to Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of
an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the “racial murder” of National
Socialism? Cannot Hitler’s most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he
had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in
a past that would not pass?116
The implication of Nolte’s argument was not that the Soviet Union and the
Third Reich were two equal totalitarian evils, but that the former prepared for
the latter. It was Lenin and Stalin who pioneered genocidal methods in the
gulag while the Third Reich copied them with Auschwitz:
Auschwitz is not primarily a result of traditional anti-semitism. It was in its core

not merely a “genocide” but was above all a reaction born out of the anxiety
of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution. This copy was far
more irrational than the original because it was simply absurd to imagine that
‘the Jews’ had ever wanted to annihilate the German bourgeoisie or even the
German people, and it is very hard to admit even a perverted ethos. It was more
horrifying than the original because the annihilation of men was conducted in a
quasi-industrial manner. It was more repulsive than the original because it was
based on mere assumptions, and almost free from that mass hatred which, in the
framework of horror, is nevertheless an understandable and as far as it goes a
reconciling element. All this constitutes singularity but it does not alter the fact
that the so-called annihilation of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction
or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original.117
Considering the genocidal nature of Bolshevism, this effectively leads to

the conclusion that the invasion of the Soviet Union was justified to save
Europe from subjugation by Asiatic barbarism. As Nolte said about Hitler’s
anti-communism: “[it was] understandable, and up to a certain point, indeed,

justified.”118
Wanting it both ways, Nolte justified the Holocaust and denied it hap-
pened. He justified the extermination of the Jews by citing a September 1939
letter written by Chaim Weizmann—a prominent Zionist—that Jews would
fight alongside Britain in a conflict with Germany. According to Nolte, this
effectively amounted to a Jewish declaration of war on Germany: “If there
is someone in the world trained to speak for all Jews, not just those from
Palestine, that someone was Chaim Weizmann. . . . Therefore, it does not
result from any absurdity to speak in principle of a ‘Jewish declaration of
war against Hitler.’”119 On the other hand, Nolte wondered whether there
was a planned genocide by questioning whether the Wannsee Conference
of January 1942 even occurred. In support of his revisionist positions, Nolte
cited and praised the work of British neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier David
Irving.120
In 1986, Nolte’s historical revisionism set off a polemical firestorm in West
Germany known as the Historikerstreit. Many of Germany’s most prominent
intellectuals on both the far right and center-left joined in the debate. The con-
servative historian Andreas Hillgruber defended Nolte by saying that the last
year of the war on the Eastern Front was a heroic effort to defend Germany
from Slavic vengeance by the Red Army. The very title of Hillgruber’s book
Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das
Ende des europaischen Judentums (Two Kinds of Doom: The Destruction of
the German Reich and the End of European Jewry) equates the defeat of the
German Reich with the Holocaust. The philosopher and Frankfurt School
member Jürgen Habermas challenged Nolte’s apologetic approach to the
Third Reich by attributing its crimes to Bolshevism.121
From abroad Ian Kershaw, a British expert on the Third Reich and a biog-
rapher of Hitler, contested many of Nolte’s claims. Kershaw argued that there
were major differences between the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler. In the
Soviet Union, Stalin was a hands-on ruler who concentrated power into his
hands. This meant Stalin bore personal responsibility for repression since he
signed arrest and execution orders during the purges. In contrast to Stalin,
the natural bureaucrat, Hitler was a born Bohemian who disdained attending
meetings and following an orderly routine.
Kershaw said the difference between Stalin and Hitler came down to the
fact that the former was not secure in his position. There were Communists
who contested Stalin’s leadership and Marxist credentials. To buttress his
position, Stalin not only increased his power, but was willing to destabilize
the USSR by removing rivals with purges and terror. Stalin’s cult of personal-
ity was an artificial graft onto Bolshevism, adopted to bolster his legitimacy.
66 Chapter Three
By contrast, Hitler’s place as German Führer was far more secure. Since
Hitler wanted to maintain his image as a leader standing above petty squab-
bles, he did not play an active role in government. Hitler undermined efforts
by other Nazi functionaries to unify administration. This ended up reducing
the state, party, and SS into rival agencies. As a result, there was a gradual
breakdown of clearly defined authority inside the Third Reich. The differ-
ent interest groups scrambled to win Hitler’s favor, since he was the only
source of legitimacy. Kershaw calls this relationship between Hitler and his
underlings, “Working Toward the Führer.” This phrase was taken from a
1934 speech by a Nazi bureaucrat named Werner Willikens who elaborated
on its meaning:
Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can hardly
dictate from above everything which he intends to realise sooner or later. On the
contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best
when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer. Very often and in many
spheres it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have
simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true
in the future; but in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the
Führer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice
it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines
and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the
finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.122
Kershaw believes that “Working toward the Führer” explains not only how the
Third Reich operated, but how the Holocaust became a reality. Bureaucrats
in the state, SS, and Nazi party who wanted to advance their careers did not
need to wait for orders from Hitler. An ambitious official could anticipate the
Führer’s desires by taking initiative to realize them. Therefore, Nazi func-
tionaries attempted to outdo one another by promoting ever more extreme
measures as the fulfillment of Hitler’s wishes. While Hitler’s leadership set
the stage for Nazi genocide, its implementation came from zealous Nazis
like Adolf Eichmann who “worked towards the Führer.” Kershaw concluded
that Hitler’s charisma and program of racial purification provided direction
to this steady radicalization from below that ended in genocide: “Hitler’s
Weltanschauung—a set of visionary aims rather than precise policy objec-
tives—now served, therefore, to integrate the centrifugal forces of the Nazi
Movement, to mobilize the activists, and to legitimate policy initiatives
undertaken to implement his expressed or implied will.”123 No comparable
ideological radicalization led Stalin or the USSR toward genocide. Whatever
Stalinism’s crimes and brutality, the Soviet Union had rational goals of mod-
ernization which were not comparable to Hitler’s chimera of a racial empire.
Saul Friedländer was among the scholars who challenged historical revi-
sionism. He said that it was impossible to “historicize” Nazi Germany since
it was not a normal period of history. This ran the risk of ignoring its inher-
ent criminality.124 Omer Bartov, an expert on the Eastern Front, noted that
revisionists such as Hillgruber ignored that the Wehrmacht was saturated in
National Socialist ideology and was complicit in the Holocaust. He said it
was wrong to equate the defeat of the Third Reich with the genocide of the
Jews. While the Soviet Union was an authoritarian dictatorship, it was not
bent on genocide. The Red Army was far more lenient with Germans than
the Wehrmacht had treated the Soviet people. Bartov noted that Hillgruber’s
whole argument was based upon accepting Hitler as a lesser evil to Stalin.
This entailed a defense of the German war effort in the USSR: “[Hillgruber]
accepts the central contention of the Nazi regime that bad as Hitler might
have been, he was by far better than Stalin. Consequently, one was justified
to defend the Nazi regime of the former from the ‘Bolshevism’ of the latter,
especially as there was ostensibly no other alternative.”125
While a great deal of Nolte’s claims have been rejected by scholars, his
concept of a “European Civil War” has been surprisingly appropriated by
leftist writers such as Enzo Traverso, Domenico Losurdo, and Arno Mayer.
While accepting the overall concept, these three have completely changed the
terms of Nolte’s narrative.
All three argue that the European Civil War began not in 1917, but in 1914.
The outbreak of the First World War marked the beginning of the collapse
of dynastic regimes, the militarization of political life, and the subsequent
clash between the forces of revolution and counterrevolution. After 1917,
revolutionary violence cannot be separated from the desperate resistance of
the counterrevolution. As Mayer says: “the Furies of revolution are fueled
above all by the resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it.”126 Despite
Nolte’s apologetics, Traverso says he correctly understood that Nazism was
a reaction to communism: “Nolte does genuinely grasp an essential feature
of Nazism; its counter-revolutionary nature, that of a movement born as a
reaction against the Russian Revolution and German Spartacism, as a militant
anti-Marxist and anti-communist force. That is true of fascism—Mussolini’s
as well as Hitler’s—and of the counter-revolution more generally, which is
always inextricably, ‘symbiotically’ linked to revolution.”127 Fascism and
communism are therefore bound together as radically opposed forces.
Mayer notes that Hitler’s racial ideology was not a copy of Bolshevism
or Marxism, but was premised on rejecting Enlightenment rationalism: “For
[Hitler], international Marxism was the final culmination and distillation of
the Enlightenment, the initial wellspring of the modernity that fired his burn-
ing hatred, fear, and aggression.”128 Losurdo argues that Nolte deliberately
ignores colonialism when comparing Nazism and communism. This was no
68 Chapter Three
small detail in understanding the Third Reich, since the Wehrmacht’s war
against the Soviet Union was modeled upon European imperialism:
Hitler constantly referred to white and European expansion in the Far West,
as well as to the British conquest of India. Underlying genocide is an act of
naturalistic de-specification and this goes back in the first instance to the his-
tory of colonialism. Naturalistic de-specification can in fact take very different
forms. . . . The attempt to revive the colonial tradition in twentieth-century
Eastern Europe entailed a gigantic programme of dis-emancipation and a hor-
rendous train of atrocities and barbarism.129
In Why the Heavens Did Not Darken? Mayer argues that the Nazi inva-
sion of the USSR was a war of annihilation inspired by a deeply ingrained
anti-communism among Germany’s bourgeoisie. This anti-communism
easily inserted itself onto Nazi delusions about “Judeo-Bolshevism.” The
mass murder of Jews was not a defensive response to the gulag, but a direct
consequence of the failed anti-Bolshevik crusade in the East: “The Judeocide
was forged in the fires of a stupendous war to conquer unlimited Lebensraum
from Russia, to crush the Soviet regime, and to liquidate international bol-
shevism. . . . Without Operation Barbarossa there would and could have been
no Jewish catastrophe, no ‘Final Solution.’”130 While Mayer, Traverso, and
Losurdo agree with Nolte that the central clash of the twentieth century was a
“European Civil War” between fascism and communism, the former reverses
the roles: the Nazis are rightfully seen as the aggressors and communists the
main victims.
Nolte’s main contribution to the counter-Enlightenment project was not
only to recast totalitarianism, but to make Nazi anti-communism respectable.
He accepted that there was a structural and criminal identity between com-
munism and fascism, but it was the former who pioneered genocide. Nazi
genocide was merely a copy—a poor one at that—of the Bolshevik original.
5. Robert Conquest
Alongside Nolte, other anti-communists also charged the USSR with sur-
passing the Third Reich in criminality. Among them was Robert Conquest,
whose book The Harvest of Sorrow, argued that the millions of deaths in the
famine of 1932–1933 were deliberately engineered by Stalin to exterminate
the Ukrainian people. Conquest’s work not only provided ammunition to
Reagan’s campaign against the “Evil Empire,” but also was a key component
in the counter-Enlightenment project.
The British-born Conquest had a long and distinguished career as a zeal-
ous anti-communist. Following military service in World War II, he was a
member of the British Foreign Office’s IRD. Conquest was an admirer of

George Orwell’s work and his assistant approached the writer for details on
Soviet sympathizers. After leaving government service in 1956, Conquest
pursued a career as a freelance scholar, focusing on fighting communism on
the intellectual front. However, he maintained a lucrative relationship with
the IRD and wrote five books on the Soviet Union at their behest between
1960 and 1965.
In 1968, Conquest released one of his most well-known works, The Great
Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. This book had the merit of being the
first comprehensive historical work on the Great Terror released in the West.
Conquest’s thesis argued that Stalin set the terror in motion in order to crush
his rivals. Following the end of the terror, Stalin perfected a new form of
totalitarian dictatorship. The Great Terror achieved international renown and
was hailed by anti-communists as the definitive exposé on Stalin’s purges. In
2005, Conquest was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George
W. Bush, who said: “The truths he told were not always in fashion, but the
cautionary lessons he taught about murderous ideologies and the men who
served them will always be relevant.”131
Revisionist scholars in Soviet studies were not so enamored of The Great
Terror. For example, Conquest claimed that Stalin had 20 million people
killed. Once the Soviet archives were opened, it was revealed that 681,692
people were executed at the high point of the terror in 1937–1938.132 Even
allowing for other deaths in the gulag, the numbers do not reach anywhere
close to 20 million. Conquest himself was unapologetic and believed his-
tory vindicated him. When his publisher suggested a new title for The Great
Terror after the fall of the USSR, Conquest suggested: “How about I Told You
So, You Fucking Fools?”133
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Conquest worked closely with other
prominent anti-communists. He was a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher
and had the ear of Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz. In 1981,
Conquest was approached by the far-right Ukrainian National Association
(UNA) to write about the 1932–1933 famine.
The product of his intellectual labors was The Harvest of Sorrow (1986),
arguing that the USSR carried out a Holodomor killing 14.5 million people,
more than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Conquest sees the
origin of the Holodomor inherent in communist ideology: “The main les-
son seems to be that Communist ideology provided the motivation for an
unprecedented massacre of men, women and children.”134 Conquest believes
Marxism inherited its murderous ideas from 1789, which set the template for
a radical revolution: “And it is indeed in France that we first find Revolution
in the sense of the complete destruction of the existing order, and its replace-
ment by abstract concepts—these latter formulated by, and dictatorially
70 Chapter Three
enforced by, theorists with no experience of real politics.”135 Thus, commu-

nism’s universalist and rationalist vision was bound to end in genocide.
Conquest sees an unbroken line of descent from Marx to Stalin, which
enables him to blame all Marxists for the terror-famine. However, a simple
examination causes this to break down. Nowhere in their work do Marx and
Engels advocate the forced collectivization of agriculture. In fact, Conquest
quotes Engels explicitly saying the opposite: “Social-Democrats would never
force, but only persuade, the German peasantry into collective ways.”136
He also believes Stalin’s collectivization campaign was a continuation of
Lenin’s policies of War Communism. Yet this focus on ideas means Conquest
completely ignores material circumstances. War Communism was an emer-
gency measure to feed starving cities in the midst of collapse and civil war.
Moreover, Lenin never advocated forced collectivization. Finally, Conquest’s
myopia means he dismisses Trotsky and Bukharin’s alternatives to Stalin
and simply views Oppositional Bolsheviks as “a pool of future Stalinists.”137
Teleology was never so easy.
There is also good reason to reject Conquest’s claim that the Ukrainian
famine was a deliberate act of genocide. For one, he twisted facts to suit his
own counter-Enlightenment agenda. Conquest’s figures are wildly inflated
and not based on any archival evidence. Instead, he uses unreliable Ukrainian
émigré accounts such as the Black Deeds of the Kremlin (referenced more
than one hundred times in The Harvest of Sorrow). Moshe Lewin dismissed
Conquest’s work as “crap” that does little more than stir up emotions: “I
am an anti-Stalinist, but I don’t see how this [genocide] campaign adds
to our knowledge. It’s adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a
pathology.”138
To arrive at a figure of 14.5 million famine deaths, Conquest compares
Soviet census data in 1926 and 1939 to determine the excess deaths. However,
demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver say that this is a basic error
of methodology since Conquest assumes that the population deficit solely
comes from famine deaths: “It is extremely misleading to interpret population
deficits as excess deaths, because the population deficit includes not just extra
people who died but also births that did not occur, whether because of delayed
marriage, separation of spouses, poor nutrition of mothers, or voluntary
fertility control, including the use of abortion.”139 More recent and rigorous
research on the Ukrainian famine by R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft
arrive at figures ranging from 4.6 to 8.5 million deaths.140 While still incred-
ibly high numbers, these are far less than those claimed by Conquest.
The claim that the famine specifically targeted Ukrainians does not hold
up either. During the collectivization drive, other national minorities along
with Ukrainian peasants were labelled as “kulaks” and suffered brutality at
the hands of the Communist Party. As Domenico Losurdo put it: “The second
revolution issuing from Moscow thus ended in a kind of colonial war, with
all the horrors peculiar to colonial wars. It was the moment in which the sys-
tem of concentration camps was developed on a broad front and affected not
only entire social classes but also entire nationalities. There is no doubt that
the Soviet leaders are responsible for the horrors.”141 According to Stephen
Kotkin, the famine was not localized in the Ukraine, but was Soviet-wide
with other regions suffering as well: “In the Kazakh autonomous republic,
probably between 35 and 40 percent of the titular nation—as compared
with 8 to 9 percent of Slavs there—perished from starvation or disease, not
because the regime targeted Kazakhs by ethnicity, but because regime policy
there consisted of forced denomadization. Similarly, there was no ‘Ukrainian’
famine; the famine was Soviet.”142
For all the famine’s horrors, there is no documentation that Stalin planned
to exterminate the Ukrainians. While Stalin did not carry out a genocide, this
does not mean he bears no responsibility for the famine. It was his policies
that set the stage for the disaster: collectivization and de-kulakization were
chaotic and carried out poorly with the unintended result of widespread fam-
ine. As Davies and Wheatcroft conclude in their study:
But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which
was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their
wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background
to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from
Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by
the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the inter-
national situation, the intransigent circumstances of geography and the weather,
and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin.
They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowl-
edge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to
industrialise this peasant country at breakneck speed.143
Certainly, one can judge Stalin’s actions as criminally negligent, but they do
not equal deliberate acts of genocide.
Confronted by all these challenges, Conquest himself retracted his
claims that Stalin caused a Soviet Holocaust. In 2003, he told Davies and
Wheatcroft: “In correspondence Dr Conquest has stated that it is not his
opinion that ‘Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue
is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put
‘Soviet interest’ other than feeding the starving first—thus consciously abet-
ting it.’”144 Yet this admission did not matter. Conquest’s work had lasting
resonance and buttressed counter-Enlightenment claims that the Soviet Union
was a totalitarian, criminal, and genocidal state.
72 Chapter Three
6. Richard Pipes
The dissolution of the USSR was championed by the West as proof of the
final victory of capitalism. No one represented this triumphalism more force-
fully than Richard Pipes. His work on the Russian Revolution was meant to
hammer the final nails in the communist coffin.
Throughout his life, Pipes gravitated toward the elite and their interests.
His academic career was spent at Harvard University, where he was the direc-
tor of the Russian Research Center. In the 1970s, Pipes served as an advisor
to anti-communist hawks in the American government such as Senator Henry
“Scoop” Jackson. While working with the CIA, Pipes adamantly opposed
détente with the USSR. This foreshadowed the belligerence of the Reagan
Administration, where Pipes was a member of the National Security Council.
The publication of Pipes’s The Russian Revolution (1990) followed by
Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1993), could not have been more timely.
The Berlin Wall had fallen and the USSR was in free fall. Communists were
questioning the very legitimacy of the system and wanted to know what had
gone wrong. In this moment, Pipes’s work offered a clear answer.
In his account of the revolution, Pipes told a Dostoevskian story about the
radical intelligentsia, who singlehandedly destroyed their country. Russian
intellectuals proved so destructive due to their embrace of the Enlightenment,
which replaced God with man. For Pipes, Communism’s failures could be
laid at the feet of materialist philosophy: “Communism failed because it pro-
ceeded from the erroneous doctrine of the Enlightenment, perhaps the most
pernicious idea in the history of thought, that man is merely a material com-
pound, devoid of either soul or innate ideas, and as such a passive product of
an infinitely malleable social environment.”145
Based on these premises, Pipes’s story is decidedly simple. He sees Lenin
as a spiteful figure who just wants to watch the world burn. In 1917, the
Bolsheviks used their demagoguery to whip up popular ressentiment, so they
could take power. Pipes denies the October Revolution any legitimacy as a
popular uprising. He condemns it as a bloody coup carried out by a cabal of
fanatical power-hungry intellectuals: “October was a classic coup d’état, the
capture of governmental power by a small minority, carried out, in deference
to the democratic conventions of the age, with a show of mass participation,
but without mass engagement.”146 Once entrenched in power, the Bolsheviks
proceeded to exterminate their enemies. They modeled the Red Terror on the
precedents set by the French Revolution. Pipes concludes that it was Lenin’s
plan all along to set-up a totalitarian state.
In an explicit reference to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work, Pipes observed that
the Bolsheviks murdered the Romanovs to join their members together in a
pact of blood:
Like the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s Possessed, the Bolsheviks had to spill

blood to bind their wavering adherents with a bond of collective guilt. The
more innocent victims the Bolshevik Party had on its conscience, the more the
Bolshevik rank and file had to realize that there was no retreating, no faltering,
no compromising, that they were inextricably bound to their leaders, and could
only either march with them to “total victory,” regardless of the cost, or go down
with them in “total doom.” The Ekaterinburg massacre marked the beginning of
the “Red Terror,” formally inaugurated six weeks later, many of whose victims
would consist of hostages executed, not because they had committed crimes, but
because, in Trotsky’s words, their death “was needed.”147
Pipes believes that Lenin’s tactics of terror and genocide were eagerly copied
by his fascist acolytes, Hitler and Mussolini. Like Nolte, Pipes sees Bolshevik
class genocide as prefiguring the Final Solution: “Lenin hated what he per-
ceived to be the ‘bourgeoisie’ with a destructive passion that fully equaled
Hitler’s hatred of the Jews: nothing short of its physical annihilation would
satisfy him.”148 Pipes finds the different intellectual origins of fascism and
communism to be immaterial, since they both ended with totalitarian police
states and mass enslavement: “As we have noted, both movements treat ideas
as infinitely flexible tools to be imposed on their subjects to enforce obedi-
ence and create the appearance of uniformity. In the end, the totalitarianism
of the Leninist-Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes, however different their intel-
lectual roots, proved equally nihilistic and equally destructive.”149
For Pipes, there were no differences among the Bolsheviks in their totali-
tarian outlook. Lenin was the teacher while others such as Trotsky and Stalin
were merely his devoted pupils. However, Pipes believes that Stalin was the
most faithful and ruthless among Lenin’s students: “Stalin’s megalomania,
his vindictiveness, his morbid paranoia, and other odious personal quali-
ties should not obscure the fact that his ideology and modus operandi were
Lenin’s. A man of meager education, he had no other source of ideas.”150
While Trotsky may have been “more honorable,” he shared the same world-
view as Lenin and Stalin: “But the record indicates that in his day Trotsky,
too, was one of the pack. His defeat had nothing ennobling about it.”151
Pipes considers irrelevant the question of alternatives to Stalin because all
Bolsheviks were already molded in Lenin’s image with no ambitions other
than power and cruelty.
Pipes’ warnings about the dangers found in Enlightenment reason echo
those written by Reagan’s hero Whittaker Chambers. A former communist
who accused Alger Hiss of espionage, Chambers was one of the godfathers
of modern American conservativism. His memoir, Witness (1952) argued that
communism was the latest incarnation of a godless ideology that stretched all
the way back to when Satan first tempted Eve:
74 Chapter Three
It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise
was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of man-
kind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have
had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision:
the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the
vision of Man without God.
It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the
world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational
intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the
world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not
because God made man in his image, but because man’s mind makes him the
most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man
as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central
star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple
method of denying God.152
Pipes would not disagree that reason and the denial of God was the root of
communist totalitarianism. While saying little that was new in his work,
Pipes’ sweeping righteous indignation captured the triumphal counter-
Enlightenment mood over communism.
7. Martin Malia
Pipes provided the first anti-communist examination of the Russian Revolution
that coincided with its defeat. However, the counter-Enlightenment needed to
offer a more comprehensive autopsy of the Soviet experiment. One of the
fullest treatments was Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy (1994), which went
from Lenin to Gorbachev.
Malia does not question that Lenin, Stalin, and other Soviet leaders
were committed to socialism. However, he argued that this did not matter
because communism was not a sound idea, but had failure written into its
Enlightenment genetic code. Citing Dostoevsky in The Possessed, Malia said
that there was a “dark side” to the Enlightenment with its “potential demonism
of rationalism.”153 Marxism claimed that there was a direction in history that
led toward a rational and egalitarian world. The Russian intelligentsia was
captivated by these ideas which proved to be explosive enough to level the
Romanov dynasty. Ultimately, the Soviet Union vindicated Dostoevsky that
reason ends in moral nihilism and murderous despotism.
Since the communist utopia of paradise on earth is impossible to achieve,
it could only end in totalitarianism. Therefore, Stalinism was not a devia-
tion from Marxism, but its fulfillment: “In short, the only practical way to
realize the Marxist purpose was through Leninism; and the only practical
way to complete the Leninist project was through Stalinism.”154 As a result,
the USSR created a monstrous state that was not amendable to reforms with
its ultimate collapse already built in: “The problem was not with the driver
but with the vehicle.”155 Malia concludes that socialism is contrary to human
and social nature, meaning that there is no alternative to capitalism: “the
Soviet failure has demonstrated that the market is part of the social order of
nature.”156
While Malia’s Soviet Tragedy repeated the standard anti-communist narra-
tives, he expanded upon them by covering the whole life span of the Soviet
Union. This proved to be a dry run for The Black Book of Communism (Malia
himself wrote the foreword) which as the final act of the counter-Enlighten-
ment project hoped to bury communism for all time.
Addendum: Stephen Kotkin

Princeton University professor Stephen Kotkin, one of Malia’s students, offers
a potential case study of a “moderate” counter-Enlightenment figure. Overall,
Kotkin agrees with Malia’s anti-communist and counter-Enlightenment posi-
tion. He considers the Soviet Union, and Stalinism specifically, to be rooted
in the Enlightenment: “Stalinism constituted a quintessential Enlightenment
utopia, an attempt, via the instrumentality of the state, to impose a rational
ordering on society, while at the same time overcoming the wrenching class
divisions brought about by nineteenth-century industrialization.”157 Like other
anti-communists, Kotkin also believes there was no break between Lenin and
Stalin since they had a shared modernist vision of socialism. Furthermore, he
believes that the USSR was bound to collapse since its alternative socialist
modernity could not catch up and overtake the capitalist West.
However, Kotkin refrains from a totalitarian analysis of the USSR. His
work The Magnetic Mountain (1995) focuses on the Soviet showpiece
city of Magnitogorsk. There, Kotkin describes the Soviet Union as a “new
civilization.” Borrowing theoretical insights from the philosopher Michel
Foucault (to whom the book is dedicated), Kotkin looks at the experiences of
everyday life in Magnitogorsk to see how the USSR functioned as a living
social system: “the city of Magnitogorsk must be understood not as a static
environment, but as a perpetually shifting, dynamic grid of relations.”158 This
is somewhat of a break with the counter-Enlightenment’s emphasis on Soviet
totalitarianism. While Kotkin avoids the category of totalitarianism in his
biography of Stalin, he still remains firmly in the anti-communist camp.159
76 Chapter Three
8. The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism is the definitive synthesis of the counter-
Enlightenment project that draws together the ideas of totalitarianism,
anti-Jacobinism, anti-Enlightenment, and religious moralism to provide a
grand account of communism’s crimes across the world. The Black Book says
that over the course of the twentieth century, communists were responsible
for 100 million deaths, making it the most lethal force in all of human history.
All the basic arguments can be found in the introduction and conclusion
by Stéphane Courtois. For instance, Courtois repeats the totalitarian cliché
that the Third Reich and the Soviet Union were genocidal regimes. Yet
he goes further and says that the 25 million deaths due to Nazism pale in
comparison to greater communist figures. Communism is the greater evil
because it practiced “universal” genocide based upon class as opposed to
Nazism’s “particular” genocide based on race. In contrast to Nazism, com-
munism’s universalism permitted its genocidal tendencies to “metastasize
worldwide.”160
Since communist regimes were founded as mafia-like criminal enterprises,
Courtois rejects any talk of either “Good Lenin/Bad Stalin” or an alternative
within communism. He concludes that there was never a “benign, initial phase
of Communism before some mythical ‘wrong turn’ threw it off track.”161
The source of communist totalitarianism can be found in its science of
history, which arbitrarily divided humanity into antagonistic classes. While
the proletariat were seen as the bearers of truth and justice, those who found
themselves outside its ranks were branded as enemies who were unworthy of
life. Courtois considered Marxist science comparable to fascist racism since it
denied the unity of the human species by reducing “people not to a universal
but to a particular condition, be it biological, racial, or sociohistorical.”162
Naturally, Courtois noted that the Bolshevik penchant for class genocide and
terror originated in Jacobinism: “Robespierre laid the first stones on the road
that spurred Lenin to terror.”163
Like Talmon, Courtois considers communism to be a messianic and totali-
tarian democratic pseudo-religion. While Christianity preaches salvation in
the afterlife, communism promises an earthly happiness. Courtois says that
this makes communism appear more insidious than the Church, since it
bases its utopian claims on the scientific folly of a “redemptive belief in the
Promethean destiny of mankind.”164 As communism proved, if men attempt
to create a paradise on earth, the results will be horrendous and destructive
beyond imagination. For Courtois, original sin—or its secular equivalent of
human nature—damns in advance any attempt to change the world.
While The Black Book aims to be a serious historical work, it was actually
an ideological production. It was no accident that Stéphane Courtois was the
chief editor. He was a former French Maoist who abandoned revolution when
Solzhenitsyn arrived in Paris. Like many others, Courtois was the latest in a
long line of ex-radicals who parroted the claim that communism was “the god
that failed.” As Daniel Singer noted in his book review:
The establishment everywhere has the art of getting the ideological services it
requires, but these were needed more in France, which had a strong Communist
Party and which in 1968 was shaken by a student rising and a big general
strike. When, in the mid-seventies, a structural crisis came on top of ideological
questioning, the system called to the rescue the so-called “new philosophers.”
Having primitively chanted “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Lin Piao,”
they simply reversed the slogan and blamed Marx for the concentration camps.
They provided no more than seasoning for a mixture of von Hayek, Karl Popper
and Solzhenitsyn. But as a theme of sustained propaganda, their warning - you
may rebel individually, but if you act collectively to alter society you will end
in the gulag was very effective. Still, its effects did wear off.165
As a work of the counter-Enlightenment, The Black Book portrays com-

munism as history’s worst evil. This means those who fought communism,
including fascists, were quietly rehabilitated. For instance, The Black Book
laments the sorry fate of Vlasov and his Nazi collaborators when they were
captured by the Red Army.166 The book’s French release in 1997 happened at
the same time as the trial of Maurice Papon, a Vichy collaborator who was
charged with helping the Nazis deport Jews to the death camps. As part of
their defense strategy, Papon’s attorneys used The Black Book. In his book
review, Adam Shatz noted the frightening implications of this: “Since the
book’s publication coincided with Maurice Papon’s trial on charges of Nazi
collaboration during the Vichy years, French readers were invited to contem-
plate the notion that partisan resistance fighters, many of them communists
and all of them in alliance with Soviet Russia, were on no firmer moral
ground than a pro-fascist bureaucrat who sent Jewish women and children to
the ovens.”167 Based on The Black Book’s arguments, one could legitimately
ask: were the Nazis victims of communism?
Since The Black Book is an ideological work, it distorts the historical
record to attribute every possible death to communism to reach the magic
figure of 100 million. This gives The Black Book the impression of atrocity
porn with inflated body counts and massacres without any regard to context.
Whether the Soviet Union was at war or peace are not taken into account.
No difference is made between the killing of Black Hundred pogromists dur-
ing the Civil War and those executed during the purges. Courtois makes no
distinction between intentional killings and those who died from neglect or
other causes.
78 Chapter Three
It can genuinely be asked what percentage of deaths in the USSR were

attributable to backwardness, capitalist encirclement, or secret police actions.
However, The Black Book makes no effort to do so. Like the rest of the coun-
ter-Enlightenment, Courtois offers no material analysis of the Soviet Union or
the other countries under discussion. Most observations about Soviet politics
do not rise above a superficial and banal empiricism. In constructing a sin-
gular “communism” Courtois erases all differences between Lenin, Trotsky,
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Ceaușescu, Hoxha, and others.
This bias was so blatant that even two contributors, Nicolas Werth and
Jean-Louis Margolin objected. Werth and Margolin were so embarrassed
by Courtois’s lack of scholarly scruples that they unsuccessfully took legal
action to remove their chapters from The Black Book. Werth, who authored
the chapters on Russia, said that despite surface similarities between the
Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, there were still profound differences:
“Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union . . . the more you compare
communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious.”168
Finally, The Black Book’s moralistic claim that communism was responsi-
ble for the greatest number of deaths in history does not withstand a moment
of honest scrutiny. A single glance at the history of capitalism gives figures
that dwarf 100 million. One can just look at the experiences of two World
Wars and fascism. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis argues that in
the nineteenth century, famines in India and China killed upwards of 60 mil-
lion people due to laissez-faire policies. That far exceeds the highest figures
given for the Ukrainian “terror-famine.” According to Domenico Losurdo,
The Black Book can only make communism into the epitome of evil by eras-
ing the history of capitalism, particularly colonialism:
Accordingly, when historical revisionism and The Black Book of Communism

date the start of the history of genocide and horror from Communism, they
engage in a colossal repression. Solemnly proclaimed, the moral commitment
to give voice to unjustly forgotten victims turns into its opposite—a deadly
silence that buries the Native Americans, the Herero, the colonial populations,
the “barbarians” for a second time. This is a silence fraught with consequences
on a specifically historiographical level as well, because it makes it impossible
to understand Nazism and Fascism.169
The Black Book of Communism is the crowning jewel of the counter-Enlight-

enment project. Yet as a bolt from the blue, the counter-Enlightenment is
unable to rationally explain the history of communism except by viewing it as
a diabolical force. What remains is a cautionary warning that communism’s
Dialectic of Saturn is found in the Enlightenment dream of human emanci-
pation, which must necessarily end in terror, totalitarianism, and genocide.
Ultimately, the counter-Enlightenment project must mystify both Stalinism

and communism in its crusade to defend private property.
NOTES
1. Quoted in David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century

Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York: Routledge,
2006), 272.
2. Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, ed. A James Gregor (New
Brunswick: Transaction, 2002), 21.
3. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is
it Going? (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972a), 248 and 278. Souvarine viewed Nazi
Germany and the USSR as equally totalitarian: “It is hardly possible that so many
analogies between Bolshevism and fascism in word and deed, in means and methods,
in institutions and types of men, do not reflect some historical relationship, unless
one admits the possibility of a complete divorce between the essence and the form.”
See Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (New York: Longmans,
Green, & Co., 1939), 673.
4. Franz Borkenau, Modern Sociologists: Pareto (London: Chapman & Hall,
1936), 196. In 1940, Borkenau wrote further about totalitarianism in The Totalitarian
Enemy. See also William David Jones, “Toward a Theory of Totalitarianism: Franz
Borkenau’s Pareto,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (July–September 1992):
455–66.
5. See William Smaldone, Rudolf Hilferding: Tragedy of a German Social Demo-
crat (DeKalb: North Illinois University Press), 196–200.
6. Winston Churchill, “The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are
Going Out),” International Churchill Society. https://winstonchurchill.org/resources
/speeches/1930–1938-the-wilderness/the-defence-of-freedom-and-peace-the-lights
-are-going-out/.
7. Robert Nisbet, “Arendt on Totalitarianism,” The National Interest 27 (Spring
1992): 85.
8. Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since
1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3.
9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976),
311. A penetrating critique of Arendt can be found in Domenico Losurdo, “Towards a
Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 2 (Janu-
ary 2004): 25–55.
10. Arendt 1976, 317.
11. Ibid., 318.
12. Ibid., 323.
13. Ibid., 378.
14. Ibid., 419.
15. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autoc-
racy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 22.
80 Chapter Three
16. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (New York: Routledge,
2011), xxxv.
17. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (New York: Routledge, 2006), 117.
Elsewhere, Hayek was explicit that the philosophical source of collectivist totalitari-
anism lay in the work of Hegel:
Perhaps nobody has seen this connection between liberalism and the insight into
the limited powers of abstract thinking more clearly than that ultra-rationalist
who has become the fountain head of most modern irrationalism and totalitari-
anism, G. W. F. Hegel.
See Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal
Principles of Justice and Political Economy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.,
1982), 33.
18. Hayek 2006, 73. Winston Churchill repeated Hayek’s talking points during
the 1945 general election, staying that the Labour Party’s program of a welfare state
would require the use of Gestapo-like methods to enforce it. In his review of The
Road to Serfdom, Orwell said that capitalism was more totalitarian than collectivism:
“But [Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means
for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible,
than that of the State.” See Orwell 1968b, 118.
19. Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 19.
Along similar lines, Leonard Schapiro argued that Leninism had little to do with
Marxist theory proper, but was more a rationalization for holding power: “In the last
resort, bolshevism proved to be less a doctrine, than a technique of action for the seiz-
ing and holding of power by the Bolshevik party.” See Leonard Schapiro, The Origin
of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase
1917–1922 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 14.
20. Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking Press,
1973), 261.
21. Ibid., 741.
22. Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1953), 354. In 1956, Brzezinski wrote: “terror is the most universal characteristic
of totalitarianism . . . It is also a constant and pervading process of mass coercion, a
continuum which persists throughout the totalitarian era.” See also Zbigniew Brzez-
inski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1956), 27.
23. Quoted in David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold
War Heretic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 279.
24. E. H. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin 1917–1929 (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1979), xvii.
25. Quoted in ibid., xxxiv. See also Stephen Cohen’s assessment of Carr in
1985, 34.
26. Ronald Grigor Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian
Revolution (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 99.
27. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1929–1941
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 591–92. See also Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revo-
lutionary 1879–1929 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973); Robert C. Tucker, “Stalinism
and Comparative Communism,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed.
Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), xviii; “Stalinism as Revolution
from Above,” in ibid., 78.
28. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2005a), xxvii. For background on Lewin, see Ronald Grigor Suny, Red Flag
Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment (New York: Verso, 2020),
131–51.
29. Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study in Collectivization
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968), 16. See also Moshe Lewin, “The
Immediate Background of Soviet Collectivization,” Soviet Studies 17, no. 2 (1965):
162–97.
30. Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From
Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),
xiii. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1991).
31. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biogra-
phy 1888–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5.
32. Cohen 1985, 62.
33. Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park: Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 2000), 138–39.
34. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), 3. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Retrospect: A Personal View,”
Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 687–88. For more on Fitzpatrick see Suny 2020,
152–80.
35. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931. (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1978); See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Impact
of the Great Purges on Soviet Elites: A Case Study from Moscow and Leningrad
Telephone,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T.
Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 247–60.
36. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth
Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 280. See also Sheila
Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
37. J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Recon-
sidered 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 198. See also
J. Arch Getty, “The Politics of Repression Revisited,” in Getty and Manning 1993,
40–62.
38. Getty 1985, 206.
39. Ibid., 213.
40. Ibid., 263. “Paradoxically, it was the very inefficiency of the state machine
which helped make it tolerable.” See Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 450.
82 Chapter Three
41. Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965, 372.

42. Adam Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the
‘Triumph of Communism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998), 83.
43. Arendt 1976, 125.
44. Ulam 1998, 195.
45. John Plamenatz, German Marxism & Russian Communism (New York: Harper
& Row, 1964), 317.
46. Ibid., xxi–xxii.
47. Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution: Ideological
Polarization in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,
1991), 535.
48. The Social Contract in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, ed.
Donald Cress (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 150.
49. Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1952), 46. For more on Talmon and the anti-Rousseau tradition in totalitar-
ian studies, see José Brunner, “From Rousseau to Totalitarian Democracy: The French
Revolution in J. L. Talmon’s Historiography,” History and Memory 3, no. 1 (Spring
1991): 60–85.
50. Talmon 1952, 127.
51. Ibid., 63–64.
52. Ibid., 12. Talmon’s work struck a deep chord with Marxist-turned-reactionary
David Horowitz:
Along with Kołakowski’s questions came others. I had been reading Political
Messianism by J. L. Talmon, which described nationalism and socialism as
secular religions that lacked a doctrine of original sin. After reading Talmon’s
account, I began to wish that I had inherited such a concept. The idea of origi-
nal sin—that we are born flawed, that the capacity for evil is lodged within us
(no matter how our consciousness may be raised)—would have instilled in
me a necessary caution about individuals like Huey Newton, and movements
like ours. There were people who had a will to evil that no amount of political
enlightenment could overcome. Nor could any movement (no less humanity)
hope to purge itself of the potential for evil that lurked in us all.
See David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: The Free
Press, 1997), 272.
53. See Doug Enaa Greene, “Day of the people: Gracchus Babeuf and the com-
munist idea,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, February 20, 2013.
http://links.org.au/node/3228; Doug Enaa Greene, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s
Politics of Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017); Doug Enaa Greene and
Harrison Fluss, “The Jacobin Enlightenment,” Left Voice, August 9, 2020. https://
www.leftvoice.org/the-jacobin-enlightenment/; Doug Enaa Greene, “Lessons of the
Commune,” Left Voice, March 21, 2021. https://www.leftvoice.org/lessons-of-the
-commune/.
54. Edmund Burke, “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” in The Phi-
losophy of Edmund Burke: A Selection from his Speeches and Writings, ed. L. I. Bred-
vold and R. G. Ross (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 248
55. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Chicago: Henry Reg-
nery Company, 1955), 75.
56. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in
Literary Investigation Volume I (New York: Harper & Row, 1974a), 256.
57. Solzhenitsyn 1974b, 616.
58. Quoted in Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1984), 156–57.
59. Ibid., 245.
60. Solzhenitsyn 1974b, 615–16. Emphasis is Solzhenitsyn’s.
61. Quoted in Scammell 1984, 435.
62. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the
Soviet Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 284.
63. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokin, The Sword and the Shield: The
Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999),
311–12.
64. Getty 1985, 219. On similar lines, see Daniel Singer, The Road to Gdansk (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 36 and Ernest Mandel, “The Gulag Archipelago
Solzhenitsyn’s Assault on Stalinism and the October Revolution,” Marxists Internet
Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1974/05/solzhenitsyn-gulag.html.
65. Horowitz 1997, 193.
66. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West: Speeches, 1975–1976 (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 72.
67. Andrew Smith, Which East Is Red? The Maoist Presence in the Soviet Union
and Soviet Bloc Europe 1956–1980 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2019), 69.
68. “Harvard Address” in Solzhenitsyn 2006, 572–74. On occasion, Solzhenitsyn
looked even earlier for the sources of socialism and found them more than two thou-
sand years ago in Plato and Gnosticism. In particular, see Solzhenitsyn 1976, 74.
69. “A Reflection on the Vendée Uprising” in Solzhenitsyn 2006, 604.
70. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little, Brown,
1975a), 10.
71. Solzhenitsyn 1974a, 129–30.
72. Solzhenitsyn 1974b, 317.
73. Solzhenitsyn 1974a, 266.
74. Solzhenitsyn 1974b, 45. In his preface to the 2018 edition of The Gulag Archi-
pelago, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson echoes Solzhenitsyn’s Nietzschean
sentiments that working class revolt is an act of ressentiment:
The hypothetically egalitarian, universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained

hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual
culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when
manifested in the world.
84 Chapter Three
See Solzhenitsyn 2018b, xv.

75. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile,
1974–1978 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018a), 218.
76. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden
Age, The Breakdown (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 1206. In his
defection from socialism, Horowitz praised Kołakowski’s condemnation of Marxism:
While I was engaged with these doubts, Kołakowski published Main Currents
of Marxism a comprehensive history of Marxist thought, the world view we all
had spent a lifetime inhabiting. For three volumes and fifteen hundred pages
Kołakowski analyzed the entire corpus of this intellectual tradition. Then,
having paid critical homage to an argument which had dominated so much of
humanity’s fate over the last hundred years (and his own as well), he added a
final epilogue which began with these words: “Marxism has been the greatest
fantasy of our century.” This struck me as the most personally courageous judg-
ment a man with Kołakowski’s history could make.
See David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s
Future (New York: Free Press, 1998), 89.
77. Kołakowski 2005, 39.
78. Ibid., 5.
79. Ibid., 101.
80. Ibid., 414. For more on the relationship between Marxism and Prometheanism,
see Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology and
Anti-Humanism (New York: Anthem Press, 2022).
81. Kołakowski 2005, 1212. Horowitz could easily have been plagiarizing
Kołakowski in his confession that the Marxist “God” had failed:
The only way to paradise—if there is a way—is through a divine intervention.

The idea that men can be as gods and recreate a paradise on earth is the serpen-
tine promise of the Left. It is an idolatry that overshadows all others. When men
put on the mantle of gods and attempt to remake the world in their own image,
the results are hideous and destructive beyond conception.
See Horowitz 1997, 414–15.

82. Leszek Kołakowski, L’esprit révolutionnaire, suivi de Marxisme, utopie et
anti-utopie (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1978), 21–22. [My translation]
83. Kołakowski 2005, 962.
84. Edward P. Thompson, “An Open Letter to Leszek Kołakowski,” Marxists
Internet Archive. https://www marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1973/kolakowski
.htm; The British political scientist Ralph Miliband also took issue with Kołakowski’s
work, which he found superficial, distorting, and wanting. See Ralph Miliband,
“Kołakowski’s Anti-Marx,” Political Studies 29 (1981): 122. Naturally, Horowitz
took the side of Kołakowski against Thompson. See his thoughts of their exchange
in Horowitz 1998, 82–88.
85. Leszek Kołakowski, “My Correct Views on Everything,” Socialist Register 11

(1974): 20.
86. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the
Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 218. For the PCF
and the French Revolution see David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals
1914–1960 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1964), 293–98.
87. See Alfred Cobban, “Myth of the French Revolution” in Aspects of the French
Revolution (London: Paladin, 1971) and Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of
the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).
88. François Furet and Denis Richet, The French Revolution (New York: Macmil-
lan Company, 1970), 184.
89. Ibid., 122. As Daniel Singer said: “Furet’s main thesis is that the age of
revolution is over. From the very start, his sympathies are with those, beginning with
Mirabeau, who try to arrest the course of events.” See Daniel Singer, “Dancing on
the Grave of Revolution” in Deserter from Death: Dispatches from Western Europe
1950–2000 (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 291. For additional criticism of Furet
on the French Revolution see Jim Wolfreys, “Twilight Revolution: Francois Furet and
the Manufacturing of Consensus,” in History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism,
ed. Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (New York: Verso, 2007), 50–70.
90. Quoted in Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar
France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 164.
91. Quoted in Michael Scott Christofferson, “An Antitotalitarian History of the
French Revolution: François Furet’s ‘Penserla Révolution française’ in the Intel-
lectual Politics of the Late 1970s,” French Historical Studies 22, no. 4 (Autumn
1999): 588.
92. Albert Soboul, Understanding the French Revolution (New York: International
Publishers, 1988), 269.
93. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
94. Ibid., 128.
95. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Barbarism with a Human Face (New York: HarperCol-
lins, 1979), 193–94.
96. Perry Anderson, In Tracks of Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 1984),
32. The unrepentant Maoist Alain Badiou described the nouveaux philosophes world-
view as positively Thermidorian. See Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (New York: Verso,
2005), 134–36.
97. Furet 1981, 12.
98. Quoted in Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Coun-
ter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), 193. In addition, see Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Spinoza’s Radi-
cal Enlightenment,” Left Voice, July 19, 2020. https://www.leftvoice.org/spinozas
-radical-enlightenment/.
99. Furet 1981, 202–3.
100. François Furet, “The French Revolution Revisited,” Government and Oppo-
sition 24, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 272–73. See also Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old
86 Chapter Three
Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1955), 20. See also
Furet 1981, 132–63 and François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880 (Malden:
Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 9.
101. Eric Hobsbawm, “History and Illusion,” New Left Review 220 (November/
December 1996): 125. As Singer observed: “François Furet is thus a sort of rich
man’s Fukuyama.” See Daniel Singer, “The Sound and the Furet,” The Nation, Janu-
ary 1, 1998. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/sound-and-furet/; See also
Furet 1999, 125, 163, 175, and 518. When it comes to Arendt’s views on totalitarian-
ism, Furet considers her weak on history, but agrees with her liberal anti-communist
approach:
I think Arendt’s historical work is weak. . . . What I admire most about Hannah
Arendt is that she sought to describe Fascism and Communism from the stand-
point of modern democracy, from the perspective of a society of individuals, of
democratic atomization and technology.
François Furet, Lies, Passions and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the
Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 59–60.
102. François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 2001), 4.
103. Furet 1999, 519. See also Richard Shorten, “Europe’s twentieth century in
retrospect? a cautious note on the Furet/Nolte debate,” The European Legacy: Toward
New Paradigms 9, no. 3 (2004): 285–304.
104. Ernst Nolte, Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken
(Berlin and Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1992), 296. Also quoted in Berel Lang, Heidegger’s
Silence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Slavoj Žižek upholds Hei-
degger’s political commitment as an example of “right steps in the wrong direction.”
See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 7.
105. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Mentor, 1965), 21. Accord-
ing to Ian Kershaw, Nolte’s work spawned a whole school of studies on fascism: “A
new wave of interest in fascism as a phenomenon experienced in most countries of
inter-war Europe was prompted in no small measure in the 1960s by the appearance
of Ernst Nolte’s highly influential book Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche in 1963.”
See Ian Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation
(New York: Arnold, 2000), 26.
106. Nolte 1965, 566.
107. Ibid., 538.
108. Ibid., 511.
109. Ibid., 453.
110. Ibid., 557.
111. Elsewhere, Nolte argued that the confrontation between revolution and
counterrevolution following 1917 had first played out in the previous century at a
philosophical level between Marx and Nietzsche. See Ernst Nolte, Nietzsche und
der Nietzscheanismus (Berlin: Propyläen, 1990), 192 and 276. See the discussion
on Nolte and Nietzsche in Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany,
1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 323–27. The centrality

of Nietzsche to the reactionary counter-Enlightenment has also been recognized by
Marxist historians. For instance, the American Marxist Arno Mayer says that Nietzs-
cheanism formed the ideological backbone to the worldview of Europe’s pre-modern
elites in their effort to hold back the tides of democracy and socialism:
But throughout Europe elite theories mirrored and rationalized current ruling
practices while also serving as a weapon in the battle against political, social,
and cultural leveling.
Nietzsche was the chief minstrel of this battle. Notwithstanding the purposely
provocative contradictions and ellipses in his writing, his thought was coher-
ently and consistently antiliberal, antidemocratic, and anti-socialist, and it
became more intensely so with the passage of time.
Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 285.
Domenico Losurdo concluded that Nietzsche’s hostility to socialism was a con-
tinuous thread throughout his intellectual life and he sought to develop philosophical
weapons to combat it:
From the very beginning, Nietzsche positioned himself on the terrain of struggle
against the socialist movement, in which the threat looming over civilization
reached its apex: how to oppose this terrible war machine, which did not hold
back from intimidating and even “annihilating” not only its enemies but also
those who would have liked to remain neutral or at least vacillate? The young
professor of philology was no less combative and tenacious than his antagonists,
as he called in his turn for the “annihilation [vernichten]” of the opera soaked
in revolutionary ideas and feelings. So, we are witnessing a fight in which no
punches were pulled. What sort of theoretical platform was necessary for the
enemies of civilisation, of modernity and subversion, to achieve victory?
See Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography

and Critical Balance-Sheet (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020a), 82.
112. Ernst Nolte, “Big Business and German Politics: A Comment,” The American
Historical Review 75, no. 1 (Oct., 1969): 78.
113. Nolte 1965, 504. See also Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” in Fascism a
Reader’s Guide—Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1976), 369.
114. Ernst Nolte, “Between Myth and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the
Perspective of the 1980s,” in Aspects of the Third Reich, ed. H. W. Koch (London:
Macmillan, 1985), 37.
115. Ibid., 32.
116. Ernst Nolte, “The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Writ-
ten but Not Delivered,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents
88 Chapter Three
of the Historikerstreit Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust,

trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Prometheus Books,
1993), 22.
117. Nolte in Koch 1985, 36. In 1951, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises
made similar arguments to Nolte about how fascism copied communism:
When the Soviet policies of mass extermination of all dissenters and of ruthless
violence removed the inhibitions against wholesale murder, which still troubled
some of the Germans, nothing could any longer stop the advance of Nazism.
The Nazis were quick to adopt the Soviet methods. They imported from Russia:
the one-party [sic] system and the pre-eminence of this party in political life;
the paramount position assigned to the secret police; the concentration camps;
the administrative execution or imprisonment of all opponents; the extermina-
tion of the families of suspects and of exiles; the methods of propaganda; the
organization of affiliated parties abroad and their employment for fighting their
domestic governments and for espionage and sabotage; the use of the diplomatic
and consular service for fomenting revolution; and many other things besides.
There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the
Nazis were.
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 580.
118. Ernst Nolte, La guerra civil europea, 1917–1945:Nacionalsocialismo y bol-
chevismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), 399. [My translation]
119. Ibid., 311.
120. Ibid., 311 and 484. See also Furet and Nolte 2001, 41–45.
121. Jürgen Habermas, “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Die apologetischen Ten-
denzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung” [translation A kind of settlement of
damages: the apologetic tendencies in German history writing], in Die Dokumenta-
tion der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistische Judenvernich-
tung, ed. Rudolf Augstein (Munich: Piper, 1987), 62–83.
122. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, “‘Working towards the Führer’: Reflections on the
Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” in Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 42.
123. See ibid. 101. For more on “working toward the Führer,” see Ian Kershaw’s
Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 527–91 and
Kershaw 2000a, 27–28. See also Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality
in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
124. Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of
Europe (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1993), 22–41 and Saul Friedlän-
der, “Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism,” German Poli-
tics & Society 13 (February 1988): 18.
125. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and the War in the Third Reich
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 143.
126. Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian
Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4.
127. Enzo Traverso, “The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth Cen-
tury,” in Haynes and Wolfreys 2007, 141. Traverso has written a whole book devoted
to the European Civil War, see Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil
War, 1914–1945 (New York: Verso, 2017). In addition, see Doug Enaa Greene,
“Combatants of a Greater War: A Historiography of Europe’s Second Thirty Years
War 1914–1945,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, June 11, 2017.
http://links.org.au/combatants-greater-war-historiography-europe-second-thirty-years
-war-1914–1945.
128. Arno Mayer, Why the Heavens Did Not Darken? The Final Solution in History
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 97.
129. Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution (New York: Verso, 2015), 181 and
189. Nolte even mentions Nazi plans to turn the conquered USSR into a German
India. See Nolte 1996, 476. Enzo Traverso described the Nazi war against the Soviet
Union as motivated by colonialism, anti-communism, and racial annihilation of the
Jews. See Traverso in Haynes and Wolfreys 2007, 143.
130. Mayer 1988, 234. Another recent work of historical revisionism in regard to
the Second World War was written by Sean McMeekin, who argues that Stalin and
not Hitler was the animating force of WWII. As opposed to Nolte, McMeekin is more
interested in criticizing Western leaders for supporting the Soviet war effort. See Sean
McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of the Second World War (New York: Basic
Books, 2021).
131. George W. Bush, “Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medal of Free-
dom,” American Presidency Project November 9, 2005. https://www.presidency.ucsb
.edu/documents/remarks-presenting-the-presidential-medal-freedom-9.
132. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, ed., The Road to Terror: Stalin and the
Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999), 591. See also J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov,
“Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the
Basis of Archival Evidence,” The American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (October
1993): 1017–49.
133. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York:
Vintage, 2002), 10. See Conquest’s confirmation on the suggested title in Robert Con-
quest, “Kingsley Amis and ‘The Great Terror,’” New York Review of Books, April 12,
2007. https://nybooks.com/articles/2007/04/12/kingsley-amis-and-the-great-terror/.
However, he did revise the figures down in the fortieth anniversary edition: “Exact
numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused
by the whole range of the Soviet regime’s terrors can hardly be lower than some thir-
teen to fifteen million.” See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (London: Pimlico,
2008), xviii.
134. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the
Terror-Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 344. The figure of 14.5 mil-
lion is given on ibid., 196.
90 Chapter Three
135. Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W. W. Nor-

ton & Company, 2000), 4.
136. Conquest 1986, 59.
137. Ibid., 78.
138. Quoted in “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust,” The Village Voice, January 12,
1988. https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/11/21/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/.
Getty also challenged Conquest’s claims of a planned Soviet genocide in the
Ukraine. His review sparked an exchange with Conquest himself. See J. Arch Getty,
“Starving the Ukraine,” London Review of Books 9, no. 22 (January 1987). https://
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n02/j.-arch-getty/starving-the-ukraine.
139. Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Demographic Analysis and Popu-
lation Catastrophes in the USSR,” Slavic Review 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 522. They
arrive at figures of 3.2 to 5.5 million during the famine years.
140. R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet
Agriculture, 1931–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 412–15. See also
the figures and analysis in R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft, ed.,
Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 67–77.
141. Domenico Losurdo, “Marx, Columbus, and the October Revolution: Histori-
cal Materialism and the Analysis of Revolutions,” Nature, Society, and Thought 9,
no. 1 (1996), 81.
142. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (New York: Penguin,
2018), 129.
143. Davies and Wheatcroft 2004, 441.
144. Quoted in ibid.
145. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Alfred A.
Knoppf, 1993), 511.
146. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 385.
147. Ibid., 788. I owe the observation about the relationship between Dostoevsky
and Pipes to Harrison Fluss. A recent history of 1917 that takes inspiration from Pipes
is Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution: A New History (New York: Basic Books,
2017).
148. Pipes 1990, 728.
149. Pipes 1993, 280–81.
150. Ibid., 508.
151. Ibid., 486.
152. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Washington DC: Regnery, 1980), 9–10. See
also John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the
Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 267–346. Reagan also posthumously
awarded posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 1984.
153. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–
1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 64. See also Martin Malia, “Judging Nazism
and Communism,” National Interest 69 (Fall 2002): 63–78.
154. Malia 1994, 314.
155. Ibid., 167.

156. Ibid., 518.
157. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 364.
158. Ibid., 154.
159. See John Marot, “Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin Is a Distorting Mirror of the Russian
Revolution,” Jacobin Magazine, November 20, 2020. https://jacobinmag.com/2020
/11/stephen-kotkin-stalin-russian-revolution-book-review.
160. Courtois, Stéphane, ed., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror,
Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), xv.
161. Ibid., xviii.
162. Ibid., 752–53.
163. Ibid., 728.
164. Ibid., 755.
165. “Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir,” in Singer 2005, 301. For another
negative review, see Paul Flewers, “Black Book of Communism,” Revolutionary
History. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol7/no4/flewers html.
166. Courtois 1999, 231. A more recent author who effectively whitewashes Nazi
collaborators in the East is Timothy Snyder. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe
Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 397. In his review of
Bloodlands, Daniel Lazare says that Synder operates in the same spirit as Nolte:
“Snyder is very much a son of Nolte. For all its obfuscation, Bloodlands basically
agrees that Stalin’s crimes were not only antecedent to those of Hitler but in some way
causative.” See Daniel Lazare, “Timothy Snyder’s Lies,” Jacobin Magazine, Septem-
ber 9, 2014. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/.
167. Adam Shatz, “The Guilty Party,” Lingua Franca. http://linguafranca mirror
.theinfo.org/br/9911/shatz html.
168. Quoted in Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey
Across America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 38. See also J. Arch
Getty, “The Future Did Not Work,” The Atlantic, March 2000. https://www.theatlantic
.com/magazine/archive/2000/03/the-future-did-not-work/378081/.
169. Losurdo 2015, 288.
Chapter Four
Stalinism as Historical Necessity

Rubashov and Terror
A. HISTORICAL NECESSITY
As shown in the previous section, anti-communists consider Stalinism—or

rather communism—as a force which appears as a bolt from the blue whether
as a contagion, Big Brother, or totalitarianism. Supporters of the Soviet Union
in the world’s Communist Parties proclaimed the opposite: that communism
was the end goal of history, and Stalinism was the only way for the working
class to reach this glorious future. For communists, it followed that anyone
who opposed the historical necessity of Stalinism stood against the working
class, reason, and the will of history itself. Before moving on to whether
Stalinism represents historical necessity, it must be asked how Marxists
define historical necessity. A concise and articulate discussion of the concept
is provided in Literature of the Graveyard (1945) by the French Communist
Roger Garaudy.‌‌
In a chapter devoted to Jean-Paul Sartre, Garaudy contrasts the Marxist and
the existentialist approaches to both necessity and freedom. In existentialist
philosophy, it is claimed that there is no meaning in the world and that we
are condemned to be free. This means that individuals are responsible agents
who must freely choose their own fate. Garaudy argues that Sartre’s notion of
freedom is based on idealism since he ignores material and historical factors
that shape the world: “In truth, having abandoned en route everything that
can make freedom rational and our history scientific, Sartre allows the minds
of his disciples to wander between a subjectivity without laws and a world
without structure. Then what becomes of objectivity in this universe without
rules? It simply fades out.”1 By denying material reality, Garaudy says that
Sartrean freedom is left suspended in midair where choices are made in a void
with no hope of effectively transforming reality.
93
94 Chapter Four
As opposed to Sartre, Garaudy says Marxists understand freedom as gain-

ing greater power over our lives, the world, and social relations. Yet how
do humans attain this freedom? We cannot pretend that individual choices
devoid of a greater understanding of reality will allow us to transform the
world. Therefore, we need knowledge of natural and social factors to suc-
cessfully act in the world. Using knowledge and science, we learn that these
factors do not exist in a vacuum, but possess history and operate according to
various laws. As our knowledge expands, we learn that the world is governed
by causal relations and that the interconnections of social and natural phe-
nomena are determined. Ultimately, only a materialist worldview can provide
an understanding of these laws.
As science allows our knowledge of the world to become more exact, this
increases our ability to successfully transform reality:
The necessity that determines our action is often only approximate, as is our
knowledge itself. But what remains true is that the more perfect this approxi-
mation is, the more compulsive our knowledge becomes. And on the day when
there is finally no opaqueness either in our social relations or in our relations
with nature, on that day the dream of Socrates will come true. This neces-
sity, all the more compulsive in that it is more reasonable, is the highest form
of freedom.2
According to Garaudy, once human beings attain knowledge of the laws that
govern reality they can freely act to change the world: “I am freer the more
lucid and the better informed I am; I am freer when I can say with more
certainty: I cannot choose otherwise. Spinoza, and after him Hegel, taught us
that to be free means to bear within ourselves all the reasons for our action.”3
For the working class, the science required to understand and transform
the world is provided by Marxism. As a materialist philosophy, the Marxist
argument for socialism is not based on dreams of an ideal society, but upon
knowledge of capitalism’s laws of motion. In Marx’s scientific work, Capital,
he observed that the system is governed by internal contradictions and will
break down with socialism as the next stage of history. Therefore, Marxists
conclude that the working class has a historical mission to overthrow capital-
ism to open the way for communism and human freedom.
To realize a proletarian revolution, every communist militant must act in
accordance with the will of history:
My action is a necessary link in the chain of necessary struggles. The birth

pangs of history require the participation of each individual—the advent of
a new world will radiate all the more human warmth if each individual has
participated in it with all his humanity. That is why I do not underestimate the
personal contribution of each individual. And, I repeat, it does not depend on me
Rubashov and Terror 95
to give or not to give freely of this joyful adherence. “Here I stand, I can do no
other.” When once I have understood what the world some day can become as
a result of our efforts, I go toward that goal with all my strength and all my joy,
with passionate attachment. “Freedom,” said Hegel, “is the affirmation of self.”
By refusing to heed this doubly compelling certainty, the science of history and
faith in the working class, I deny myself and the world.
I want this certainty passionately, and cannot help but want it when I have
become conscious of it. To us, as to Spinoza, freedom is this necessity which
has become conscious, this creative participation in the dialectics of necessity
which ushers us into a new life of an unsuspected fullness.4
One can appreciate Garaudy’s understanding of materialist necessity as

grounded in the traditions of Spinoza and Hegel without necessarily embrac-
ing his own Stalinist politics. The Trotskyist George Novack in his anthology
Existentialism versus Marxism valued Garaudy’s exposition of freedom and
necessity. One can even see strange similarities between Garaudy’s chapter
on Sartre and the way Novack criticized Sartre in his own essay on exis-
tentialism.5 However, as an orthodox Stalinist, Garaudy believed that the
international communist movement and the Soviet Union were fulfilling the
mandate of history. When figures like Trotsky, Radek, and Bukharin opposed
Stalin, they placed themselves on the other side of the barricades:
On the other hand, having deserted the forces of life, what could such a renegade
bring to the forces of death? Truths once glimpsed by us stick to us; and in my
renunciation I would only have the unhappy and dual conscience of a Radek or
a Bukharin. If my joining the Communist Party has been the beginning of my
freedom, my betrayal would be the beginning of my agony, that agony which is
always the price paid for a bad choice.6
This brought up the central dilemma of historical necessity that gripped fig-
ures such as Arthur Koestler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Were all the Soviet
Union’s compromises just the necessary price that the working class must pay
to reach freedom? Or were rationalizations of historical necessity just cynical
excuses for indefensible crimes and totalitarianism?
B. ARTHUR KOESTLER
When Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in

1931 at the height of the Great Depression, he was a fervent believer in the
historical necessity of communism. He recalled that there was no doubt in
his mind that the party possessed a road map to the future: “Both morally
96 Chapter Four
and logically the Party was infallible: morally, because its aims were right,
that is, in accord with the Dialectic of History, and these aims justified all
means; logically, because the Party was the vanguard of the Proletariat, and
the Proletariat the embodiment of the active principle in History.”7 Koestler
was ready to serve this historical necessity.
In 1932, he traveled to the Soviet Union to witness this future firsthand.
Arriving at the height of the Ukrainian famine, Koestler managed to brush
aside any doubts. He ended up working with the famed propagandist Willi
Münzenberg on behalf of the Comintern. After leaving the Soviet Union,
Koestler moved to Paris, where he was active as an anti-fascist in German
émigré circles.
Hungry for action once the Spanish Civil War began, Koestler was sent
by the Comintern to Franco’s headquarters in Seville. Using the cover of a
journalist, he revealed evidence of Italian and German military support for
the Nationalists. Eventually, his cover was blown and Koestler was forced to
flee. He returned to Loyalist Spain in early 1937, but was captured in Málaga
when the Nationalists took over the city.
While in Nationalist custody, Koestler was sent to Seville and sentenced to
death. It seemed his execution would be imminent, but Koestler was kept in
prison. His party membership remained a secret that Koestler was desperate
to hide. Whenever the guards asked if he was a communist, Koestler denied
it. At one point, a friendly guard named Don Ramón asked how an educated
man like him could be a communist. Koestler said that he was no longer one:
“I had spoken the truth, but with the intention of telling a lie. Inwardly, I no
longer was a Communist, but the break was neither conscious nor definite;
and my intention in uttering that phrase was, of course, that Don Ramón
should report it.”8 Miraculously, he was not killed. In June 1937, Koestler
traveled to Britain after a successful campaign for his release.
The time in prison changed Koestler and shook his convictions:
The lesson taught by this type of experience, when put into words, always
appears under the dowdy guise of perennial commonplaces: that man is a real-
ity, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations
of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the
infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the
means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social
utility, and charity not a petty-bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force
which keeps civilization in its orbit. Nothing can sound more flatfooted than
such verbalizations of a knowledge which is not of a verbal nature; yet every
single one of these trivial statements was incompatible with the Communist
faith which I held.9
Still outwardly loyal to the Communist International, Koestler was disturbed

by reports of the Soviet purges. His childhood friend, Eva Striker, living in
the USSR, was arrested and falsely accused of plotting to kill Stalin. She was
imprisoned for sixteen months, spending twelve of them in solitary confine-
ment. After being deported from the USSR in September 1937, Striker told
Koestler what she endured. He was amazed at the parallels with his own time
in Franco’s dungeons. Elements of Strikers’s account would find their way
into Darkness at Noon.
While on a book tour to promote The Spanish Testament, Koestler spoke
to audiences who were largely sympathetic to the Communist Party. He
attempted to hide doubts about repression in the USSR and Republican Spain.
At one talk, Koestler was asked about the suppression of the POUM. He
admitted that he did not agree with their revolutionary program, but in a break
with Stalinist orthodoxy, said that they were not fascist traitors. This brought
Koestler cheers from noncommunists in the audience, but eerie silence from
party members. At a Paris stop on his book tour in March 1938, Koestler was
asked by the party to publicly condemn the POUM. He outright refused and
resigned from the party. Koestler’s resignation coincided with Bukharin’s
show trial in Moscow.
In the first of his two letters of resignation, Koestler proclaimed that he was
still a communist and loyal to the Soviet Union. The second letter expanded
upon Koestler’s reasons for leaving the party. While he condemned the purges
for creating an inquisitorial atmosphere in the Communist International,
Koestler still upheld the USSR as an expression of historical necessity: “It’s
the foundation of the future. Whoever goes against the Soviet Union goes
against the future. But whoever presents it, afflicted as it is by all the laws
of transition and by the adolescent growing pains of Stalinism, as a finished
prototype of the future, is offering us a caricature of the future. The Soviet
Union is the most precious thing we have at present, but it is no prototype.”10
Until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he remained a dissident communist who
grappled with Stalinism.
One of the first works where Koestler dealt with the meaning of histori-
cal necessity was The Gladiators (1938), a historical novel about the slave
revolt led by Spartacus in 73–71 BC. The figure of Spartacus was revered by
communists. Marx considered him the greatest figure of antiquity, and Rosa
Luxemburg named the “Spartacus Bund”—the predecessor to the German
Communist Party—after him. While Koestler knew all this, he had very little
knowledge of the actual revolt itself. He first became interested in Spartacus
in 1935 and did extensive research on Roman history. It was only after his
release from Seville that Koestler was able to finish his novel.
The Gladiators was a product of Koestler’s break with the Comintern.
He did not merely want to tell the story of Spartacus, but to understand
98 Chapter Four
the connection between revolutionary ends and means. Looking at the

socioeconomic conditions that made the revolt possible, Koestler considered
it a model of a revolutionary situation. But while the slaves greatly out-
numbered the masters and nearly brought down Rome, they had still failed.
Koestler wanted to know why. To answer this, he saw parallels with the fail-
ure of the German and Italian workers to defeat fascism: “And why, two thou-
sand years later, did the German and Italian proletariat still fail to recognise
their own interests, and support the Neros and Caligulas of their own age?”11
Koestler believed that Marxism with its rationalist philosophy could not
explain these failures. He sought other answers in understanding the irrational
nature of mob mentality: “Why did the ‘Party of the masses’ ignore the dis-
coveries of Le Bon, Fraser, Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, Freud and Jung, who all
stressed the irrational and affective nature of group behaviour, so strikingly
demonstrated by Fascism and its allied movements?”12 He concluded that the
oppressed were not driven by reason, but more fickle and base motives.
In addition, Koestler’s research led him to conclude that the slaves pos-
sessed a political program of utopian communism that they attempted to
realize. In The Gladiators, he imagines that the slaves create an egalitarian
society known as Sun City. In an obvious analogy to the Russian Revolution,
slaves elsewhere fail to revolt, and Sun City is isolated. As the Roman block-
ade tightens, Spartacus is forced to compromise and negotiate for aid. As food
becomes scarce, the slaves grow restless, and Sun City begins to fracture.
Here Koestler confronts whether egalitarian ideals must be sacrificed for a
revolution to survive:
They had built their City, had dreamed of leading a life of Justice and Goodwill
within her walls. But the period in which these unfortunate men lived would
have none of it. It reached across their walls and reminded them that beyond not
the laws of the Sun State reigned supreme, but the law of the stronger, which
left slaves no choice besides servitude or the use of brute force. Those who had
desired to live like humans, were compelled to become wolves once again.13
Spartacus confronts this choice between ends and means when a group of
slaves breaks the law. According to the laws of Sun City, they must be cruci-
fied for the greater good. While Spartacus knows this is necessary, he refuses
to do so: “Wisdom and knowledge alone did no longer carry enough weight
to make him give the order.”14 Ultimately Spartacus’s indecisiveness means
that Sun City falls apart and the slaves are defeated by Rome.
Koestler believes that Spartacus should have temporarily subordinated
egalitarian ideals by acting in accordance with the ruthlessness that his-
tory demands. This means that egalitarianism, momentary passions, and
democracy must be replaced by the will of a single dictator who knows what
is necessary:
There must be but one will, the will of the knowing. For he alone can see the
goal, the end of bad detours, the progress in apparent retrocession. He must
force them upon the road so that they may not be scattered about the earth;
ruthless to their sufferings, deaf to their cries. He must defend their interests
against their own want of reason, with all and any means, however cruel and
incomprehensible they might appear.15
Yet Spartacus failed to understand the “law of detours” and historical neces-
sity that all revolutions must confront:
The century of abortive revolutions was completed, the Party of Justice had lost
out, its strength was spent and exhausted. Now nothing could impede the greed
for power, nothing barred the way to despotism, no barrier to protect the People
was left. He whose grasp is the most brutal can now rise to untold heights: dicta-
tor, emperor, god. Who will be the first to reach the winning post?16
In his retelling of Spartacus, Koestler embraced a Nietzschean view that

social hierarchies are natural and inescapable, where a permanent class of
slaves is lorded over by masters. Koestler likened slaves to prisoners, who
were motivated by ressentiment and could never overcome their station in
life. As Koestler said about his time in jail:
Despite all my feelings of self-respect I cannot help looking on the warders

as superior beings. The consciousness of being confined acts like a slow poi-
son, transforming the entire character. This is more than a mere psychological
change, it is not an inferiority complex—it is, rather, an inevitable natural pro-
cess. When I was writing my novel about the gladiators I always wondered why
the Roman slaves, who were twice, three times as numerous as the freemen, did
not turn the tables on their masters. Now it is beginning gradually to dawn on
me what the slave mentality really is. I could wish that everyone who talks of
mass psychology should experience a year of prison.17
Since slaves and prisoners cannot liberate themselves, a dictator was needed
to do it for them. However, this slave mentality is permanent so the egalitar-
ian dream of Sun City and later, the October Revolution, is impossible to
achieve.18
In The Gladiators, Koestler dealt with revolution at a distance since
Spartacus refuses to do what history requires. He never deals with what
would happen if someone fully accepted the logic of historical necessity.
The confessions of lifelong revolutionaries to fantastic charges during the
Moscow Trials seemed to pose those very questions. Now Koestler intended
100 Chapter Four
to confront Stalinism and historical necessity directly in his next and most
famous novel, Darkness at Noon (1941).
Koestler began working on the novel almost immediately after finishing
The Gladiators. He wrote the bulk of Darkness at Noon in Paris (his upstairs
neighbor was Walter Benjamin) as the Germans invaded. Initially written
in German, the novel was translated into English by his then-wife Daphne
Hardy. The original German manuscript was lost during the fall of France
and not found until 2015.19 Almost immediately after its release, Darkness at
Noon was recognized as an instant classic. George Orwell believed Koestler’s
work was not only great literature, but clearly understood the logic of
Stalinism: “Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant litera-
ture, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow ‘confes-
sions’ by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods.”20 While
it sold poorly in Europe due to the war, Darkness at Noon was a bestseller in
the United States.
Darkness at Noon focuses on a dedicated veteran Bolshevik named Nikolai
Rubashov. The character himself is a composite figure of Radek, Trotsky, and
Bukharin. Through a series of flashbacks, the reader learns about Rubashov’s
career, which embodies all the terrible ironies and betrayals of Stalinism.
During the purges, Rubashov is arrested and charged with unspecified coun-
terrevolutionary crimes. At first, he proclaims innocence, but eventually he
confesses his guilt. Rubashov willingly confesses because he now accepts
that the party represents historical necessity. Rubashov states at one point:
“The Party can never be mistaken,” said Rubashov. “You and I can make a mis-
take. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a thousand
others like you and I. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in
history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she
flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which
she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes
no mistakes. He who has not absolute faith in History does not belong in the
Party’s ranks.”21
Throughout Darkness at Noon, Koestler fleshes out Rubashov’s logic for

submitting to the party. Rubashov believes that the revolution is in dire straits
and must fortify itself against all internal and external threats. Whoever
refuses to do so threatens the revolution. To ensure unity of the party and
criminalize dissent, the former oppositionist Rubashov must admit that he is
a traitor. His interrogator Gletkin explains the rationale: “The policy of the
opposition is wrong. Your task is therefore to make the opposition contempt-
ible; to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime and that the
leaders of the opposition are criminals. That is the simple language which the
masses understand . . . Sympathy and pity for the opposition are a danger to
the country.”22
Whereas Spartacus is unable to act according to the “law of detours,”
Rubashov willingly sacrifices himself to that logic. A confession of guilt
would mean that he would disavow his entire revolutionary career, but it
would serve the higher interests of the party and history. Rubashov accepted
that the immature people could not reach the future by themselves, but they
needed the party to guide them: “It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes
generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself
to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for
self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.”23
Even though as a former oppositionist Rubashov sees sheer cynicism in the
party’s demands, he remains trapped by the same logic since he is a true
believer in communism.
In the end, Rubashov accepts that his past opposition to the party was a
mistake. If his opposition had succeeded, it would have gone against histori-
cal necessity:
“I know,” Rubashov went on, “that my aberration, if carried into effect, would
have been a mortal danger to the Revolution. Every opposition at the critical
turning-points of history carries in itself the germ of a split in the Party, and
hence the germ of civil war. Humanitarian weakness and liberal democracy,
when the masses are not mature, is suicide for the Revolution. And yet my
oppositional attitude was based on a craving for just these methods—in appear-
ance so desirable, actually so deadly. On a demand for a liberal reform of the
dictatorship; for a broader democracy, for the abolition of the Terror, and a
loosening of the rigid organization of the Party, I admit that these demands, in
the present situation, are objectively harmful and therefore counterrevolutionary
in character.”24
Rubashov knows that he is subjectively innocent, but objectively guilty at the

tribunal of history.
For Koestler, historical necessity is the Dialectic of Saturn. This logic not
only justifies the terror and misery of Stalinism, but the moral destruction of
human beings. As a Bolshevik, Rubashov kills others for the revolution and
then debases his own soul for the sake of history. For Koestler, the frightening
reasoning of historical necessity was enough for him to reject communism.
Yet Koestler was not finished dealing with the relationship between ends
and means. His novel Arrival and Departure (1943), which formed a loose
trilogy with The Gladiators and Darkness at Noon, dealt with the conflict
between pragmatism and ethics. In The Yogi and the Commissar (1945),
Koestler identified two mutually opposed ways to reach utopia. The first was
the “commissar” represented by revolutionaries like Rubashov, which argued
102 Chapter Four
that change came from without. The antithesis was the Yogi represented by
pacifists like Gandhi, which claimed change came from within. Koestler saw
the merits in both positions, but believed they were equally flawed. The com-
missar’s logic led to the horrors of the Moscow Trials, while the Yogi led to
passive surrender. Koestler said that a synthesis of the Commissar and Yogi
was needed, but that no one in history had discovered one: “Neither the saint
nor the revolutionary can save us; only the synthesis of the two. Whether we
are capable of achieving it I do not know.”25
Due to the German occupation, Darkness at Noon was not published in
France. Yet upon its release in 1945 under the title of Le Zéro et l’Inni, it
was a sensation. Many in the French public feared a Communist takeover.
At the Liberation, the Communists emerged as the largest single party in
the country. The PCF had ministers in the government and demanded the
punishment of Vichy collaborators. Koestler saw these demands for reprisals
as reminiscent of the Stalinist witch hunts in Spain: “The Communists, who
emerged from the Resistance movement as the best-organised force, used
these chaotic weeks, just as they had done in Spain, for a systematic settling
of accounts with their opponents under the pretext that they had been col-
laborators.”26 Later, Koestler believed that his book caused the defeat of a
communist-supported constitutional referendum in May 1946.
After years away from Paris, Koestler returned and basked in his newfound
fame. He also wanted to meet Sartre and the other rising stars of existential-
ism. For a long time, there had been a mutual admiration between Sartre
and Koestler. Koestler considered Sartre’s The Wall (1938) to be one of the
finest works written on the Spanish Civil War. In turn, Sartre was influenced
by Koestler’s Dialogue with Death, part two of The Spanish Testament.
Thus, Koestler had ample reason to believe that Sartre would become his
political ally.
First, he met Albert Camus and the two men became fast friends. It was
only in October 1946 that Koestler found his way into Sartre’s circle. At their
first meeting, Simone de Beauvoir was unimpressed by Koestler, consider-
ing him too right-wing. After being introduced to Koestler, Sartre said: “You
are a better novelist than I am, but not such a good philosopher.”27 Koestler
noted that Sartre looked like “a malevolent goblin.”28 Despite these awkward
moments, Koestler and Sartre appeared to get along quite well.
Yet political disagreements between them appeared almost immediately.
Koestler did not hide his anti-communist fervor. Beauvoir recalled the pas-
sionate arguments that ensued:
Touchy, tormented, greedy for human warmth, but cut off from others by his
personal obsessions—“I have my Furies,” he used to say—Koestler’s relations
with us were always fluctuating. . . . “It’s impossible to be friends if we differ
about politics!” [Koestler] said in an accusing tone. He rehashed his old grudges
against Stalin’s Russia, accusing Sartre and even Camus of trying to compro-
mise with the Soviets. We didn’t take his lugubriousness seriously; we were not
aware of the passionate depths of his anti-Communism.29
Politics was intermingled with sex and love affairs. As Koestler sought to
win Camus as a political comrade, Camus fell in love with Koestler’s partner
Mamaine Paget. Furthermore, Koestler found time to pursue his own brief
romance with Beauvoir.
On October 29, 1946, there was a particularly heated argument between
Koestler, Camus, Sartre, and André Malraux over communism. Koestler
argued that both the USSR and Nazi Germany were two identical forms of
totalitarianism. Sartre refused to condemn the Soviet Union by pointing out
the lynchings in the United States. Koestler told Sartre that by keeping quiet
on communism he was acting against history: “It must be said that as writers
we are guilty of treason in the eyes of history if we do not denounce what
deserves to be denounced. The conspiracy of silence is our condemnation in
the eyes of those who come after us.”30
During the arguments, Koestler noticed that Camus was out of step with
Sartre’s communist sympathies. After the exchange, Camus seemed to have
been convinced by Koestler. A few days later, Camus encountered an old
Resistance friend who had adopted Marxism. When they spoke, Camus used
words that were reminiscent of Koestler:
Met Tar. as I came away from the public statement I made concerning dialogue.
He seems reticent, yet has the same friendly look in his eyes that he had when I
recruited him into the Combat network.
“You’re a Marxist now?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll be a murderer.”
“I have already been one.”
“I too. But I don’t want to be anymore.”
“You were my sponsor.”
That was true.
“Listen Tar. This is the real problem: whatever happens, I

shall always defend you against the firing squad. But you
104 Chapter Four
will be obliged to approve my being shot. Think about that.”
“I’ll think about it.”31
Five years later, Camus would make his anti-communism explicit in The
Rebel, which brought about his final split with Sartre. It seemed that Koestler
was right: politics came before friendship.
At each meeting, the chasm between Sartre and Koestler grew wider.
Koestler was adamant that the Communists were plotting civil war and it was
necessary to support de Gaulle against them. An ardent anti-Gaullist, Sartre
advocated neutrality in the Cold War. At one disastrous meeting, Beauvoir
remembered how the personal and the political collided:
[Koestler] wanted to repeat our night [of October 1946] at the Scheherazade.
We went with him. Mamaine, Camus, Sartre and myself—Francine wasn’t
there—to another Russian nightclub. [Koestler] insisted on letting the maître
d’hôtel know that he was being accorded the honor of waiting on Camus,
Sartre and Koestler. In a tone more hostile than the year before, he returned
to the theme of “No friendship without political agreement.” As a joke, Sartre
was making love to Mamaine, though so outrageously one could scarcely have
said he was being indiscreet, and we were all far too drunk for it to be offen-
sive. Suddenly, Koestler threw a glass at Sartre’s head and it smashed against
the wall.32
Sartre and Beauvoir attempted to deescalate things, but Koestler wanted to

continue the quarrel. When Camus tried to calm him down, Koestler punched
him in the face. The friendship between Sartre and Koestler was over.
Now, the anti-communist commissar proceeded to throw his support
behind the West in the Cold War. In 1949, Koestler worked as an adviser
to the British IRD. In addition, they financially supported him by purchas-
ing copies of Darkness at Noon for mass distribution in the Eastern Bloc.
Koestler also found himself drawn into the cultural Cold War. During a lec-
ture tour in the United States, he met with Bill Donovan, one of the founders
of the Central Intelligence Agency. Together, they discussed the best ways to
counteract Soviet propaganda.33
Koestler ended up becoming one of the guiding spirits behind The God that
Failed (1950), a bestseller in the propaganda war. This anthology brought
together Koestler and five other former communist supporters—Ignazio
Silone, André Gide, Richard Wright, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender—
who detailed their disillusionment with communism as a warning to the West.
As Koestler said in his contribution: “It’s the same with all you comfortable,
insular, Anglo-Saxon anti-communists. You hate our Cassandra cries and
resent us as allies—but, when all is said, we ex-communists are the only

people on your side who know what it’s all about.”34
While The God that Failed was a smashing success (thanks in part to the
CIA), it was only a dry run for a larger cultural offensive. Koestler and the
CIA wanted to unite the noncommunist left in support of the Cold War. This
project became the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) launched in 1950.
The CCF included many anti-communist superstars such as Ignazio Silone,
Sidney Hook, Franz Borkenau, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Raymond Aron,
and James Burnham. Their founding congress was held in West Berlin just
as the Korean War began in June 1950. Koestler delivered the major address
where he condemned the evils of communist totalitarianism.
Koestler and the CIA hoped to win over French intellectuals to their cause,
particularly the pro-communist Sartre. However, Sartre publicly condemned
the Congress of Cultural Freedom and refused to attend its founding meet-
ing. But there was one final meeting between Sartre and Koestler. While en
route to West Berlin to the inaugural CCF meeting, Koestler ended up on the
same train as Sartre who was heading to Frankfurt. Even though they were
on opposite sides of the Cold War, the two shared an amicable meal together.
Koestler believed that if Beauvoir had been there, things would not have been
so pleasant: “Had la Simone been with him this would not have been possible,
but minus her he behaved like a schoolboy on holiday, keeping forbidden
company, and the old affection between us was restored for a night.”35
As the Cold War began, Koestler’s underlying belief in historical neces-
sity remained. He had merely switched sides from communism to anti-com-
munism. As Isaac Deutscher noted, this was no more than just an inverted
Stalinism:
But, whatever the shades of individual attitudes, as a rule the intellectual

ex-communist ceases to oppose capitalism. Often he rallies to its defence, and
he brings to this job the lack of scruple, the narrow-mindedness, the disregard
for truth, and the intense hatred with which Stalinism has imbued him. He
remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in
white and black, but now the colours are differently distributed. As a communist
he saw no difference between fascists and social democrats. As an anti-commu-
nist he sees no difference between nazism and communism. Once, he accepted
the party’s claim to infallibility; now he believes himself to be infallible. Having
once been caught by the “greatest illusion,” he is now obsessed by the greatest
disillusionment of our time.36
In the coming years, Koestler found himself disillusioned with the capital-
ist West as well. He saw it infected with a materialist and rationalist spirit.
Ultimately, Koestler’s rejection of Stalinism was the starting point for
106 Chapter Four
him doubting the whole Enlightenment tradition and any idea of historical
necessity.
C. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
The French Communists recognized that Darkness at Noon was a power-

ful attack on the logic of Stalinism. Therefore, it is no surprise that they
did not allow Koestler to go unanswered. Roger Garaudy’s Literature of
the Graveyard was one such polemic that ferociously attacked Darkness at
Noon.37 However, Garaudy like the majority of Communist works directed
at Koestler did not rise above crude apologetics for the Moscow Trials. In
order to find a true engagement with Koestler, one must look outside of the
PCF’s ranks. The most sophisticated answer to Darkness at Noon was found
in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror.
Just like Koestler, Merleau-Ponty was horrified by the Moscow Trials.
While sympathetic to Marxism, the Great Terror caused Merleau-Ponty to
distance himself from the PCF. As Sartre remembered:
From a few conversations which we had later, I was left with the feeling that
before 1939, he had been closer to Marxism than he was ever to be subse-
quently. What made him withdraw from it? I imagine that it was the Trials. He
must have been very upset by them, for he spoke of them at great length, ten
years later, in Humanism and Terror. After the trials, he could hardly even be
disturbed by the German-Soviet Pact.38
During World War II, Merleau-Ponty did not follow Koestler toward anti-
communism. Instead, he experienced the war as an apocalyptic event that
shattered the old world. From those ruins, Merleau-Ponty sought a new idea
of reason. As he wrote later in the inaugural issue of Les Temps Modernes in
October 1945:
The experience of chaos, on the speculative level as on the other, invites us

to look at rationalism in an historical perspective from which it claimed in
principle to escape, to look for a philosophy which will make us understand
the surging forth of reason in a world it has not made, and which will prepare
the vital infrastructure without which reason and freedom become empty and
decompose.39
Merleau-Ponty concluded that Marxism was the necessary scaffolding for

this new philosophy of reason. In 1946, he aligned with the Communist Party,
stating: “the Communist is the permanent hero of our time.”40
At the height of Koestler’s fame, Merleau-Ponty wrote a series of articles

engaging him. In 1947, these were collected into a book titled Humanism and
Terror. Merleau-Ponty’s work is more than a criticism of Darkness at Noon
or even Arthur Koestler himself but is perhaps the most refined philosophical
defense of Stalinism ever written.
Merleau-Ponty argued that Marxism was the philosophy of history. He
said that Marxism was chiefly a method to decipher the secrets behind
events, develop analyses, and bring forth the light of reason from the dark-
ness of unreason. At the core of Marxism was its theory on the necessity
of proletarian revolution. As the universal class created by capitalism, the
proletariat represents the interests of all humanity. Communism would allow
for the creation of a truly humanist society. Therefore, real humanism equals
communism.
He says that the humanist claims of liberal society are false since they
mask that capitalism is maintained by terror and violence. If the proletariat
does not wish to continue to be the victim of capitalist violence, then it is
necessary for them to use their own violence and overthrow the bourgeoisie.
Merleau-Ponty concludes that capitalist reality means it is impossible to con-
demn all violence a priori and look inward for spiritual change like Koestler’s
Yogi: “We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between
different kinds of violence.”41
That being the case, what was Merleau-Ponty’s response to Koestler? For
one, he says that Rubashov was not a faithful representation of Bukharin’s
position, since his arguments for confessing are fatalistic and mechanical.
Rubashov sees history proceeding behind the backs of the working class with
its secrets only known to the party: “The logic which Rubashov follows is
not the existential logic of history described by Marx and expressed in the
inseparability of objective necessity and the spontaneous movement of the
masses; it is the summary logic of the technician who deals only with inert
objects which he manipulates as he pleases.”42 Darkness at Noon ends up por-
traying the logic of historical necessity as an inexorable process where cadres
act as mindless cogs in a machine. When Rubashov says the party can make
no mistakes, Merleau-Ponty notes that this attitude is more suited to papal
infallibility than to Marxism: “But Rubashov’s reply is in no way Marxist if
it attributes a divine infallibility to the Party; since the Party has to deliberate,
there can be no question of any geometric proof or any perfectly clear line.
Since there are detours it shows that at certain moments the official line needs
reconsideration and that if it were persisted in would lead to error.”43
Merleau-Ponty says that Bukharin, as a Marxist, believed that history is
not some mysterious external force, but required active participation by the
working class to create the future. This means that Rubashov’s Commissar
logic is just a caricature of Marxism invented by Koestler:
108 Chapter Four
But who said that history is a clockwork and the individual a wheel? It was not
Marx; it was Koestler. It is strange that in Koestler there is no inkling of the
commonplace notion that by the very fact of its duration, history sketches the
outline for the transformation of its own structures, changing and reversing its
own direction because, in the last analysis men come to collide with the struc-
tures that alienate them inasmuch as economic man is also a human being. In
short, Koestler has never given much thought to the simple idea of a dialectic
in history.44
Even if Koestler was a “mediocre Marxist” and Rubashov was a fictional

character, this did not mean that the philosophical problems raised by the
Moscow Trials were simply imaginary. Merleau-Ponty agrees with Koestler
that these were not ordinary trials, but the oscillations between Yogi and
Commissar did not reveal their true meaning.
Merleau-Ponty says that the Moscow Trials must be understood as politi-
cal events and the defendants should be judged according to the logic of the
revolution. As demonstrated by his own testimony, Bukharin accepted this:
“World history is a world court of judgment.”45 During the proceedings,
Bukharin denied many of the specific charges of espionage and sabotage.
However, he took full political responsibility for criminal acts, even if he had
no direct involvement with them:
Consequently, I plead guilty to what directly follows from this, the sum total
of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization. Irrespective of
whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took a direct part in any particular act.
Because I am responsible as one of the leaders and not as a cog of this counter-
revolutionary organization.46
Did this mean that Bukharin’s contradictory stance of accepting overall

responsibility and denying specific actions show that the trials were just a
frame-up? Outsiders who focus simply on the judicial nature of the trials miss
their wider political meaning. Merleau-Ponty says that the Moscow Trials are
incomprehensible without understanding the wider context of revolutionary
violence and the transition to communism: “The Moscow Trials only make
sense between revolutionaries, that is to say between men who are convinced
that they are making history and who consequently already see the present as
past and see those who hesitate as traitors.”47
Bukharin was to be judged according to the logic of struggle. As an oppo-
sitionist, he was defeated by Stalin. However, his program served as a rally-
ing center for enemies of the Soviet Union. Objectively, this meant Bukharin
ended up in the camp of the counterrevolution. This made him guilty of “his-
torical treason.”48 Yet Merleau-Ponty said Bukharin’s tragedy was that he was
subjectively a Marxist who recognized his guilt before history:
By contrast, the true nature of tragedy appears once the same man has under-
stood both that he cannot disavow the objective pattern of his actions, that he
is what he is for others in the context of history, and yet that the motive of his
actions constitutes a man’s worth as he himself experiences it.49
As a consequence of his defeat, Bukharin accepted that he must be consumed

by the Dialectic of Saturn.
When it came to Trotsky, Merleau-Ponty believed that he had performed
great services to the revolution in the past. However, history was not made
by figures like Trotsky with “such a tenacious belief in the rationality of his-
tory that when it ceases for a while to be rational, they throw themselves into
the future they seek rather than have to deal with compromises and incoher-
ence.”50 Since Trotsky was too attached to abstract rationality, he was unable
to compromise with reality like Stalin. As a result, political life became
impossible for Trotsky and he ended up as a beautiful soul condemning his-
tory from the sidelines.51
Merleau-Ponty doubted Trotsky’s claims that Stalinism was the
Thermidorian degeneration of the revolution. He believed this was based
on a misunderstanding of the French Revolution, since Thermidor and
Bonapartism were not intrinsically counterrevolutionary, but secured the
gains of 1789. Merleau-Ponty left it open that Stalin, like Napoleon, had
performed a necessary function by fortifying the revolution:
For it remains open whether, historically, Thermidor and Bonaparte destroyed

the Revolution or rather in fact consolidated its results. It is possible that in the
clash of events the radical future of the Revolution is preserved better through
compromise than a radical policy, just as, in the history of political thought, the
Hegelian compromise had more of a future than Hölderlin’s radicalism.52
In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty refused to pass a definitive judge-

ment on the Moscow Trials or Stalinism. He believed that history had not cast
its final verdict on communism yet. He argued that it was necessary to wait.
He used the analogy of France under German occupation where the outcome
of the war remained undecided. Both Vichy and the Resistance judged their
actions according to a future victory. While the fighting raged, it was illegiti-
mate to make impartial judgements on the actions of either side. A Frenchman
either condemned or supported them. It was only after the defeat of Nazi
Germany and Vichy that history proved the Resistance was correct. Similarly,
it was still too soon to say whether Stalinism was historically necessary: “The
Communist has launched the conscience and values of private man in a public
undertaking which should return them a hundredfold. He is still waiting for
the returns.”53 Merleau-Ponty ended up changing the terms of the debate on
110 Chapter Four
historical necessity by transforming it into a Pascalian wager on the future. If

Stalinism is a historical necessity, then it can only be justified ex post facto.
Merleau-Ponty offered his own criteria on when it would be appropriate
to judge Stalinism. In the context of the Cold War, the USSR was a bulwark
of peace and progress against Western imperialism. The United States was
inciting war against the Soviet Union. Merleau-Ponty said if the Soviet Union
launched an aggressive war, then history will have shown that Stalinism did
not lead to communism: “If it happens tomorrow that the U.S.S.R. threatens
to invade Europe and to set up in every country a government of its choice, a
different question would arise and would have to be examined. That question
does not arise at the moment.”54
The outbreak of the Korean War led Merleau-Ponty to conclude that the
wager of history had gone against Stalinism. According to Sartre, this led
Merleau-Ponty to take a neutral stance on Korea. They discussed their posi-
tions while waiting for a train:
He repeated quietly: “The only thing left for us is silence.”
“Who is ‘us,’” I said, pretending not to understand.
“Well, us. Les Temps Modernes.”
“You mean, you want us to put the key under the door?”
“No, not that. But I don’t want us to breathe another word of politics.”
“But why not?”
“They’re fighting.”
“Well, all right, in Korea.”
“Tomorrow they’ll be fighting everywhere.”
“And even if they were fighting here, why should we be quiet?”
“Because brute force will decide the outcome. Why speak to what has no ears?”
I leaned out of the window and waved, as one should. I saw that he waved back,
but I remained in a state of shock until the journey’s end.55
It was only with the publication of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) that
Merleau-Ponty announced his abandonment of Marxism, historical neces-
sity, and communism. He said that the idea of reason in history was an
Enlightenment hangover that must be rejected: “We are living on the left-
overs of eighteenth century thought, and it has to be reconstructed from top
to bottom.”56
Since there is no endpoint to history, Merleau-Ponty said that revolutions
had no justification in necessity. Rather, historical necessity is simply an
excuse to justify purging internal enemies since revolutions inevitably ossify
once they assume power:
It is no accident that all known revolutions have degenerated: it is because as

established regimes they can never be what they were as movements; precisely
because it succeeded and ended up as an institution, the historical movement
is no longer itself: it “betrays” and “disfigures” itself in accomplishing itself.
Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.57
Drawing upon the libertarian-Marxist Daniel Guérin, who wrote about popu-
lar movements during the First French Republic, he argued that it was no
accident that the French Revolution ended in disaster:
The abortion of the French Revolution, and of all the others, is thus not an
accident which breaks a logical development, which is to be attributed to the
particularities of the rising class, and which will not take place when the ris-
ing class is the proletariat: the failure of the revolution is the revolution itself.
Revolution and its failure are one and the same thing.58
Merleau-Ponty concluded that the Dialectic of Saturn was written not only
into the French Revolution. The experience of Stalinism proved that proletar-
ian revolutions followed the same pattern with bloody purges to hunt down
mythical enemies:
We are in the realm of the occult. All the history of communism since Trotsky,
the actions and reactions, the ups and downs, the purges and turning-points, all
that is verifiable, all the events are conjured away: there is only one substance
of history, the advances of subversion.59
In place of historical necessity or the wager on Stalinism, Merleau-Ponty

now advocated a third way between capitalism and communism. Instead
of revolution, the noncommunist left should embrace parliaments and
reforms. When it came to international affairs, Merleau-Ponty retreated from
anti-imperialism, arguing that France must hold onto its colonies for the sake
of world peace:
I do not want Algeria, Black Africa, and Madagascar to become independent

countries without delay; because political independence, which does not solve
112 Chapter Four
the problems of accelerated development, would give them on the other hand
the means for permanent agitation on a world scale, and would aggravate the
tension between the U.S.S.R. and America without either one being able to bring
a solution to the problems of underdevelopment as long as they continue their
arms race.60
Merleau-Ponty’s former comrades on the far left rejected his new liberalism.
One of the sharpest responses came from Simone de Beauvoir. She argued
that Merleau-Ponty’s view of revolutions was based on idealist abstractions
since he ignored the material conditions that produced them. Furthermore,
Beauvoir argued that revolutionary violence was not pointless bloodshed, but
the only rational way for radicals to win:
One kills from hunger, anger, and despair. One kills to live. The stake is infinite
for it represents life itself with its infinity of possibilities, but it never assumes
the positive and utopian image of a paradisical society. If Merleau-Ponty
assumes the contrary because he ignores dire situations; neither the word nor
the idea of need appear in his analyses. But an absolute of rebellion and refusal
erupts from dire needs, and that does not allow the revolutionary the leisure to
draw up a balance sheet. In the quiet of his study, Merleau-Ponty may tell him-
self that if revolution does not achieve the absolute Good, the game is not worth
the effort; but he is talking for himself; therefore, revolutions betray solely his
dreams and not themselves.61
When it came to Merleau-Ponty’s reformism and electoralism, Beauvoir con-

cluded it was a dead end. The influence of the bourgeoisie in parliament was
permanently weighed against the working class. This was not an accident, but
done by design because the existing state served bourgeois interests. Beauvoir
said that reformism was deluded to argue that the capitalist state could ever
advance working-class politics: “Merleau-Ponty must be quite a fool to
expect that a class that is the enemy of the proletariat, if entrusted with the
task of remaking history, would do so for the proletariat.”62
From different vantage points, both Arthur Koestler and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty confronted the Stalinist arguments for historical necessity. In
Darkness at Noon, Koestler concluded that Stalinism’s ruthless logic did not
lead to a promised communist future, but to totalitarianism. Merleau-Ponty’s
Humanism and Terror recast historical necessity into a Pascalian wager. Yet
he found when history rolled its dice that Stalinism came up short. In the
end, Koestler and Merleau-Ponty concluded that historical necessity was the
Dialectic of Saturn that led to Stalinism.
NOTES
1. Roger Garaudy, Literature of the Graveyard: Jean-Paul Sartre, François Mau-

riac, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 14.
2. Ibid., 13–14.
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Ibid., 58–59.
5. See George Novack, ed. Existentialism versus Marxism: Conflicting Views
on Humanism (New York: Dell Publishing Co, 1966). Novack’s contribution is on
317–40 and Garaudy on 154–63.
6. Garaudy 1948, 59.
7. Arthur Koestler in The God that Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York:
Harper & Row, 1963), 34.
8. Arthur Koestler, Invisible Writing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), 359.
9. Koestler in Crossman 1963, 68.
10. Quoted in Scammell 2009, 163.
11. Koestler 1954, 264.
12. Ibid.
13. Arthur Koestler, The Gladiators (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.,
1965a), 216. In The Rebel, Albert Camus includes details about Spartacus and the
slaves’ political program that shows the clear influence of discussions with Koestler:
“Spartacus’ rebellion recapitulates the program of the servile rebellions that preceded
it. But this program is limited to the distribution of land and the abolition of slavery.”
See Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 109.
14. Koestler 1965a, 232.
15. Ibid., 222.
16. Ibid., 310.
17. Arthur Koestler, Dialogue with Death (New York: Macmillan Company,
1942), 139.
18. Stanley Kubrick based his 1960 Spartacus film on the novel of the same name
by the American Communist writer Howard Fast. During production, another Sparta-
cus movie was planned, which would have been based on Koestler’s novel. This film
was not made since the Kubrick version went into production first. However, Kubrick
wanted to use elements from Koestler’s Gladiators in his version. The blacklisted
screenwriter on Spartacus, Dalton Trumbo outright refused stating that Koestler’s
novel undermined the moral grandeur of the revolt. The following quote from a memo
by Trumbo highligts his criticism of Koestler’s elitism:
Thus was the first campaign against the stature of Spartacus defeated. Then
I began to see a second campaign to diminish the character get underway,
directed, my dear Stanley Kubrick, by you. Stanley read Koestler. Koestler is
a man who was for years bewitched by the idea that he was going to make a
revolution, that he was going to lead the dear people in a vast freedom move-
ment. But the revolution didn’t come off because the people, in their immense
stupidity, didn’t see fit to follow Mr. Koestler. Koestler has spent all the years
114 Chapter Four
of his life since that fatal moment of rejection by the people in denouncing the
common herd, which had so little comprehension of his excellence as a leader.
His thesis is simple: the people are stupid, corrupt and altogether responsible
for their own miseries. Leaders, on the other hand, are the elite of mankind,
tragically frustrated, tragically pulled down and destroyed by the decadence and
vulgarity of the very rabble they sought to lead to freedom. Thus Koestler has
rationalized the stupidities of his own youth by placing them on the backs of the
gross mob, which refused to recognize his virtues . . . The point is not whether
the Koestler theory is philosophically or historically right or wrong: it is rather
that all theories are debatable, and that the Koestler theory is directly antithetical
to the theory of the script of Spartacus. . . . I think it is dead wrong to transmit
any part of Koestler into Spartacus. Nevertheless, the Koestler theory still pops
up, not as a “conspiracy” but as a conviction on Stanley’s part, and I think we
must accept it, or reject it, since it is impossible to compromise with it.
Quoted in ed. Martin M. Winkler, ed. Spartacus: Film and History (Malden: Black-
well Publishing Ltd., 2007), 58–59.
19. Alison Flood, “After 80 Years, Darkness at Noon’s Original Text Is Finally
Translated,” The Guardian, September 24, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books
/2019/sep/24/darkness-at-noon-original-text-gets-first-english-translation-arthur
-koestler.
20. George Orwell, “‘For what am I fighting?’: George Orwell on Arthur
Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon.’” The New Statesman, January 4, 1941. https: //
www newstatesman.com/culture/2013/01/what-am-i-fighting-george-orwell-arthur
-koestlers-darkness-noon.
21. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 34.
22. Ibid., 193.
23. Ibid., 135.
24. Ibid., 153.
25. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd.,
1965b), 232.
26. Koestler 1954, 403.
27. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance Volume I: After the War (New
York: Harper & Row, 1977), 108.
28. Arthur Koestler, Stranger on the Square: Arthur and Cynthia Koestler (New
York: Random House, 1984), 67.
29. Beauvoir 1977, 109.
30. Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942–1951 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 146.
31. Ibid. 147–48. Lowercase in the original. This is quite similar to how Camus
would later talk about revolutionaries, whether Jacobins or Communists, in The
Rebel: “The majority of revolutions are shaped by, and derive their originality from,
murder. All, or almost all, have been homicidal.” See Camus 1991, 108.
32. Beauvoir 1977, 140.
33. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 58.
34. Crossman 1963, 2.

35. Koestler 1984, 71.
36. “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience,” in Deutscher 1969, 15.
37. Ironically, one of François Furet inspirations to join the PCF was reading Dark-
ness at Noon. See Christofferson 1999, 574.
38. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty,” in Situations (New York: George Braziller,
1965), 242–43.
39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1964), xii.
40. Beauvoir 1977, 44.
41. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist
Problem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 109.
42. Ibid., 15. See also Barry Cooper, Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: from terror to
reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 70.
43. Merleau-Ponty 1969, 16.
44. Ibid., 23.
45. Ibid., 62. This is also a quote from Hegel. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 372.
46. Quoted in Merleau-Ponty 1969, 45. See the trial transcript in The Great Purge
Trial, ed. Robert C. Tucker and Stephen Cohen (New York: Grosset and Dunlap
Publishers, 1965), 328.
48. Ibid., 52.
49. Ibid., 62.
50. Ibid., 80.
51. Ibid., 152. Ironically, Merleau-Ponty defended Trotsky’s position on critical
defense of the USSR in WWII as the “very language of 1917—as faithful to class and
historical consciousness as it is to action.” See Merleau-Ponty 1964, 258.
52. Merleau-Ponty 1969, 73. This is reminiscent of Lukács’ arguments in “Hölder-
lin’s Hyperion” that will be discussed later. It is highly likely that Merleau-Ponty
had read this essay since he was familiar with Lukács and discussed him at length in
Adventures of the Dialectic.
53. Ibid., xxi.
54. Ibid., 184.
55. Sartre 1965, 274–75. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dia-
lectic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 229.
58. Ibid. 219. Sartre also took issue with Guérin’s view of the French Revolution
as reductionist in Search for a Method (New York: Vintage, 1968c), 39. However,
Sartre did praise Guérin’s work in a footnote: “These comments and those which fol-
low were suggested to me by Daniel Guerin’s La lutte des classes sous la Première
République, a work which is often open to question but fascinating and rich in new
insights. Despite all the mistakes (due to Guérin’s wish to force history), it remains
116 Chapter Four
one of the few enriching contributions that contemporary Marxists have made to the
study of history.” Ibid. 37. For more on Sartre’s engagement with Guérin see Ian
Birchall, “Sartre’s Encounter with Daniel Guérin,” Sartre Studies International 2, no.
1 (1996): 41–56.
60. Ibid., 334–35.
61. Simone de Beauvoir, “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” in Political
Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmerman (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2021), 246–47.
62. Ibid., 258.
Chapter Five
Stalinism as Historical Necessity

The Ambiguities of Western Marxism
Others on the left, whom Merleau-Ponty dubbed “Western Marxists,” had a

more complicated relationship with Stalinism. Emerging in the aftermath of
World War I and the isolation of the Russian Revolution, Western Marxists
kept their distance from Stalinism and social democracy. They were not a uni-
fied group, but contained diverse currents with no clear program. In the ranks
of Western Marxism were members of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who preferred the solitude of academia to
active politics. There were also Communist Party militants, such as Antonio
Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, and Eric Hobsbawm, who were
politically engaged. What all Western Marxists shared was a greater intellec-
tual focus, particularly on issues related to culture, philosophy, and ideology
than existed in the ranks of orthodox Marxism.‌‌
When it came to Stalinism, the response of Western Marxists was ambigu-
ous. As Perry Anderson observed: “It never completely accepted Stalinism;
yet it never actively combated it either.”1 These equivocations on Stalinism
were the product of concrete material circumstances. Western Marxists who
were Communist Party militants were obliged to defend Stalinism, due to a
combination of conviction and discipline. Others such as Bertolt Brecht and
Ernst Bloch, who were exiles from Nazi Germany, saw the Soviet Union as
the only salvation from fascist barbarism. Western Marxists’ responses to
Stalinism varied: Brecht’s agony, Adorno’s embarrassing silences, Althusser’s
hidden criticisms, Sartre’s fellow traveling, and Bloch’s prosecutorial briefs.
On the whole, Western Marxists failed to either understand Stalinism or
develop a Marxist alternative to it.
117
118 Chapter Five
A. THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER
No group represented the contradictory relationship of Western Marxism

toward capitalism and Stalinism more than the Frankfurt School. Originally
founded in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research to carry out Marxist
studies, the organization only got off the ground after receiving a generous
endowment from the grain merchant Hermann Weil. Bertolt Brecht noted that
the Frankfurt School’s capitalist origins compromised its ability to carry out
anti-capitalist research: “the story of the frankfurt sociological institute. a rich
old man (weil, the speculator in wheat) dies, disturbed at the poverty in the
world. in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do
research on the source of this poverty. which is, of course, himself.”2
This inside/outside approach meant that the Frankfurt School deliberately
kept its distance from organized left-wing politics. Its members (with notable
exceptions such as Henryk Grossman) stayed aloof from both socialist and
communist parties. Strangely for an avowed Marxist institution, the Frankfurt
School had no official position on the Soviet Union, whether positive or nega-
tive. When Friedrich Pollock wrote Experiments in Economic Planning in the
Soviet Union 1917–1927, he delicately refrained from declaring any support.
The Frankfurt School’s retreat from Marxist orthodoxy increased fur-
ther after Horkheimer became its director in 1930. In “The Impotence of
the German Working Class” (written in 1927 but only published in 1934),
Horkheimer was skeptical about the ability of Germany’s working-class par-
ties to carry out a proletarian revolution. He said that the social democrats
were unwilling to act, and the communists were unwilling to think. This split
between the two parties could only be overcome “in the last analysis on the
course of economic‌‌‌‌‌ processes. . . . In both parties, there exists a part of the
strength on which the future of mankind depends.”3 Ultimately, Horkheimer
was pessimistic about the two parties overcoming this division.
The Frankfurt School’s gloom increased once Hitler came to power and
its members were forced into exile. In 1935, Adorno and Horkheimer rees-
tablished the Frankfurt School at Columbia University in New York. Despite
American exile, the Frankfurt School’s frame of reference remained fixated
on Western Europe, Marxism, and the Soviet Union. The Frankfurt School
saw the Soviet Union and not the capitalist West as the last bulwark against
fascism. As Adorno said in 1936: “In two years at the most, Germany will
attack Russia, while France and England stand back on the basis of the trea-
ties which will have been signed by then.”4 In line with their overall apoliti-
cism, Adorno and Horkheimer felt it was prudent for the Frankfurt School to
stay discreetly silent on the Soviet Union.
The Ambiguities of Western Marxism 119
In private though, Adorno was willing to vent his anger about Stalinism.
After the first Moscow Trial in August 1936, he wrote in disbelief to
Horkheimer: “Has the planet really and truly gone to Hell?”5 Two years later
in 1938, Adorno was angered when the Marxist composer Hanns Eisler made
a joke about the execution of Bukharin. He wrote to Walter Benjamin:
I listened with not a little patience to his feeble defence of the Moscow tri-
als, and with considerable disgust to the joke he cracked about the murder
of Bukharin. He claims to have known the latter in Moscow, telling me that
Bukharin’s conscience was already so bad that he could not even look at him,
Eisler, honestly in the eyes. I am not inventing all this.6
However, Adorno made a distinction between private remarks and public

statements. While he was horrified at Zinoviev’s execution, Adorno told
Horkheimer that they could not afford to say anything lest it embarrass the
Soviet Union: “The most loyal attitude to Russia at the moment is probably
shown by keeping quiet.”7 Adorno admitted that it was hard to stay silent
about Stalinism’s crimes, but the dangerous times required it: “in the current
situation, which is truly desperate, one should really maintain discipline at
any cost (and no one knows the cost better than I!) and not publish anything
which might damage Russia.”8
Adorno was not alone in his disgust at Stalinism. When Bloch defended
the Moscow trials, Horkheimer was outraged. Adorno told Benjamin about it:
“Max was just as furious about his essay on Bukharin as we both were. It is
inevitable precisely with people like Bloch that they get into hot water once
they start to get clever.”9
However, Horkheimer’s stance on Stalinism was more enigmatic than that
of Adorno. In the 1930s, Horkheimer agreed with Adorno about the necessity
to maintain discipline on Russia. Yet he was not uncritical of Stalinism. As he
later admitted in 1956, he thought the Soviet Union was already well on its
way to fascism: “The Russians are already halfway towards fascism.”10 While
refusing to identify with the Soviet Union, Horkheimer believed it still repre-
sented something better than Western capitalism: “We have nothing in com-
mon with Russian bureaucrats. But they stand for a greater right as opposed
to Western culture. It is the fault of the West that the Russian Revolution went
the way it did.”11
Despite Horkheimer’s pessimism, Marxism still remained part of his
thinking. His 1939 essay “The Jews and Europe” argued that fascism was an
outgrowth of capitalism: “But whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism
should also keep quiet about fascism.”12 In the essay, published mere weeks
after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Horkheimer directed his fire against
120 C
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the Third Reich while passages about the Soviet Union were excised from
the final text.13
Even though Adorno and Horkheimer offered tacit support to the USSR,
they remained totally despondent when it came to the Western working
class. At the end of World War II, Adorno proclaimed that the proletariat
had no revolutionary potential left: “The decay of the workers’ movement
is corroborated by the official optimism of its adherents.”14 For Adorno and
Horkheimer, the postwar era signaled their desertion of‌‌‌‌ any class-based or
orthodox Marxist analysis. Adorno believed that the experience of fascism
disproved any ideas of progress or reason in history:
Had Hegel’s philosophy of history embraced this age, Hitler’s robot-bombs

would have found their place beside the early death of Alexander and simi-
lar images, as one of the selected empirical facts by which the state of the
world-spirit manifests itself directly in symbols. Like Fascism itself, the robots
career without a subject. Like it they combine utmost technical perfection with
total blindness. And like it they arouse mortal terror and are wholly futile. “I
have seen the world spirit,” not on horseback, but on wings and without a head,
and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel’s philosophy of history.15
In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer announced

their near-absolute pessimism about the possibilities of human emancipation:
“What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why human-
ity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of
barbarism.”16 In contrast to Marxism, they argued that humanity’s efforts to
exercise control over nature, not the class struggle, was the motor of history.
This led to the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment which resulted
in domination over the individual, technological rationality, and the manipu-
lation of mass society. While Stalinism was not directly discussed, the con-
clusions of the Dialectic of Enlightenment implied a rejection of the Soviet
Union as another form of instrumental reason. As Martin Jay observed:
Marx of course was by no means the major target of the Dialectic. Horkheimer
and Adorno were far more ambitious. The entire Enlightenment tradition, that
process of allegedly liberating demystification that Max Weber had called die
Entzauberung der Welt (the disenchantment of the world), was their real target.17
As Brecht noted, the position of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno

and Horkheimer, was untenable: they were committed to criticizing bourgeois
society while adapting to it. Lacking a social anchor and a political program,
Adorno and Horkheimer saw no escape from capitalism. Ultimately, their
pessimism led to complete hopelessness as they came close to the positions
of the counter-Enlightenment.
B. ERNST BLOCH
For the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, the Russian Revolution offered
hope for a redeemed world. In The Spirit of Utopia (1918), Bloch proclaimed
that Bolshevism was the “categorical imperative with revolver in hand.”18
After his visions of a revolutionary apocalypse receded, Bloch’s faith in the
Soviet Union remained unshaken.
Like others in the Frankfurt School, Bloch was forced into exile by Hitler.
Among the émigrés, he was second to none in his defense of Stalin. Bloch
stated that the Soviet Union was the only force in the world that dared to
confront fascism. That meant everyone had to stand either for or against the
USSR. There was no middle ground:
Monopoly capitalism does not engender ambivalence. The choice between

it and the socialist cause of the people is an easy one. In today’s situation it
should be clearly evident that anti-bolshevist statements serve only the devil
himself. . . . This ideal can be furthered only by the popular front. And a popular
front does not require a fervent or absolute commitment to Russia, but rather the
modest, and one would think perfectly acceptable realization: there can be no
struggle, there can be nothing good without Russia.19
During the Moscow Trials, there was no doubt in Bloch’s mind that all the
accused were guilty as charged. From his home in Czechoslovakia, Bloch vol-
unteered to write affidavits “proving” that the defendants were in league with
Germany and Japan.20 The Soviet embassy never took him up on the offer.
Other left-leaning intellectuals did not share Bloch’s Stalinist zeal. They
saw the Moscow Trials leading to the same bloody end as the French
Revolution. Bloch answered this skepticism in Jubilee for Renegades (1937)
arguing that while the two revolutions were not comparable, the intellectual
disillusionment of former supporters was:
Often the disillusionment of today seems to be only the echo of an earlier loss
of faith—like the repetition of a misfortune which had beset even greater spirits
of the past. I am thinking specifically of the many German poets and thinkers
who wavered at the time of the French Revolution and of the doubts which
arose ten to twenty years after 1789. I am thinking of the shock that occurred
when winds from the West brought with them the unmistakable odor of blood.
To be sure, there are significant differences (but these differences do not shed
a favorable light on the current vacillation). The French Revolution is not the
Russian Revolution; and the “Reign of Terror” is certainly not comparable to
the Moscow show trials. The French events affected a servile and uncommitted
Germany which has little in common with the present day Germany of emigra-
tion. Moreover, the literary renegades of today are only in part German, i.e., they
122 C
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only stem in part from a politically inexperienced people. Since they do not have
a Goethe or Schiller among them, they also lack the justification which Voltaire
once conceded to genius: “It is the privilege of genius to make grand mistakes
with impunity.” Nevertheless, there is a parallel between the shock of then and
the shock of today—between the shock regarding the Revolutionary Tribunal
and the shock regarding the Moscow trials. This parallel lies in the unwillingness
both then and now to comprehend the sudden radicalization as stemming from
the impact of foreign policy affairs. The similarity lies in the hurried and almost
totally unheralded desertion at the very moment the Revolutionary Tribunal put
enthusiasm to the test—to the test of a concept rooted in the concrete.21
According to Bloch, the Moscow Trials were not proof that the revolution
was eating its own. It was the worsening international situation that was to
blame since the Soviet Union was threatened on all sides by hostile powers.
If the revolution was going to survive, then ruthless measures must be taken
against enemies.
Bloch dismissed Leon Trotsky’s cries of a Stalinist Thermidor. To him,
Trotsky’s anti-Stalinism was merely a pretense to cover his treason and fascist
collusion:
How believable the sabotage here, the pernicious work, even the secession of
the Ukraine: the overthrow of the Stalin bureaucracy dignifies all means, drives
Trotskyism toward the enemy of its enemy and today justifies for it another
Brest-Litovsk. . . . The end result of Trotskyist activity would, of course, not
be world revolution (which the emigrants of the bourgeois right by no means
desire). In spite of all this the result would be the introduction of capitalism in
Russia and, in case this result should not be sufficiently horrifying for our right
wing emigrants—on the contrary—it can be put in even plainer language: the
effect would be German fascism in Moscow.22
As already discussed, Bloch’s defense of the trials revolted Adorno and

Horkheimer. His Stalinism meant the Frankfurt School refused to grant him
a position. An enraged Bloch is allegedly to have condemned Adorno and
Horkheimer as “the swine on 117th street.”23
After the war, Bloch returned to East Germany when he was offered the
chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. In 1955, Bloch was awarded
the National Prize and full membership in the German Academy of Sciences.
Despite the heretical nature of Bloch’s Marxism, he was now a full member
of the East German establishment.
During his years of exile and time in East Germany, Bloch did not lose his
faith in the Soviet Union or Stalin. Even Khrushchev’s Secret Speech did not
upset his convictions. However, he feared that Khrushchev had given free
license to anti-communists. According to his son, Jan Robert:
Bloch assessed Stalin and his terrors after the 20th Party Congress in
half-critical distance from the revelations and with skeptical subjunctives with
respect to their validity. His reaction was with the “same gait and plan of attack”
as before—with the warning not “to slip into liberalism,” for there would be
danger that “a few reactionary rats would creep out of their holes with the liber-
als, too.24
However, Bloch was sympathetic to reformists in Eastern Europe, par-

ticularly Władysław Gomułka in Poland. When the Warsaw Pact invaded
Hungary, he was aghast. In November 1956, at a speech marking the 125th
anniversary of Hegel’s death, Bloch condemned East German support for the
invasion. The response of the authorities was swift. Bloch was declared unfit
to teach and forced to retire. In 1961, he left for West Germany, eventually
settling in Tübingen. In a case of historical irony, the ex-Stalinist Bloch ended
up teaching in the very place where Hegel studied theology.
In his final years, Bloch shed his Stalinism without renouncing Marxism.
In 1968, at a speech commemorating Marx’s 150th birthday, Bloch reflected
on the Bolshevik Revolution. He said it was a heroic effort to create social-
ism in unfavorable conditions. Unfortunately, the revolution succumbed to
Russia’s czarist heritage, leading to the betrayal of Stalinism:
It should be clear that the absence of bourgeois revolutionary modernization in

Czarist Russia necessarily had specific consequences in the new Russia. There
the springs of social wealth ran not richer but poorer than in more developed
capitalist countries. In the absence of long-standing forms of bourgeois freedom
the predicted dictatorship of the proletariat had to be established directly on the
basis of the Czarism that had immediately preceded it. Among the results were
the personality cult, an extensive and absolutist centralization, lack of room
for any except a “criminal” opposition, the terror and the police state, and an
all-powerful state police—even when complete security for the Socialist power
had been won internally.25
By defending the original integrity of the 1917 revolution against later

Stalinist degeneration, Bloch strangely found himself close to Trotsky, whom
he had once reviled.
C. WALTER BENJAMIN
A recurring theme in Walter Benjamin’s work is that humanity can only be

delivered from evil through a final apocalyptic event. He saw the Russian
Revolution and communism as forces in this coming Armageddon. In
Critique of Violence (1921), Benjamin called Bolshevism and anarchism
124 C
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forms of messianic “divine violence” that would break “this cycle main-
tained by mythic forms of law, on the suspension of law with all the forces
on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition
of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.”26 Communist divine
violence would shatter the old world in a single blow and institute a new
kingdom on earth.
Despite his early sympathies for Bolshevism, it was not until 1924 that
Benjamin began to seriously study Marxism. While staying on the Italian
island of Capri, he was joined by Ernst Bloch and met the Latvian Bolshevik
Asja Lācis. She suggested that he read Georg Lukács’s History and Class
Consciousness (1923).27 Lācis became not only one of Benjamin’s intellec-
tual mentors, but his lover as well. When Benjamin learned that she was an
acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht, he asked for an introduction. Nothing hap-
pened. It would only be several years later that Benjamin finally met Brecht
and they discovered common political ground.
In the following year, Benjamin continued his studies of Marxism. Among
the works he read was Trotsky’s Where Is England Going? Benjamin seri-
ously considered joining the German Communist Party and traveling to
Moscow to see the Soviet Union firsthand. In 1926, his enthusiasm for join-
ing the KPD cooled somewhat. He suspected that if the party learned about
his anarchist sympathies, then they would quickly kick him out.28
While Benjamin never joined the KPD, he did travel to the Soviet Union,
staying there from December 1926 until February 1927. During his time in
Moscow, Benjamin observed that public concerns seemed to overshadow
private lives: “Everything is in the process of being built or rebuilt and almost
every moment poses very critical questions. The tensions of public life—
which in large part have an almost theological character—are so great that, to
an unimaginable degree, they seal off everything private.”29 Benjamin came
away less than impressed by what he saw in the USSR. He believed that the
death of Lenin was also the end of the revolution’s heroic era. Benjamin was
saddened that the Soviet Union had lost its revolutionary élan by embracing
a producerist ideology with its obsessions of industrialization:
For Bolsheviks, mourning for Lenin means also mourning for heroic Communism.
The few years since its passing are, for Russian consciousness, a long time.
Lenin’s activity so accelerated the course of events in his era that he is receding
swiftly into the past; his image is quickly growing remote. Nevertheless, in the
optic of history—opposite in this to that of space—movement into the distance
means enlargement. Today other orders are in force than those of Lenin’s time,
admittedly slogans that he himself suggested. Now it is made clear to every
Communist that the revolutionary work of this hour is not conflict, not civil war,
but canal construction, electrification, and factory building. The revolutionary
nature of true technology is emphasized ever more clearly. Like everything else,
this (with reason) is done in Lenin’s name.30
At the time of Benjamin’s visit, the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was
reaching its height. Some of Benjamin’s criticisms of Soviet foreign policy
echoed those of the Trotskyist Opposition. He linked Stalin’s advocacy of
socialism in one country to a retreat from Bolshevism’s program of interna-
tional revolution and the deadening of political life:
In its foreign policy the government is pursuing peace in order to enter into
commercial treaties with imperialist states; domestically, however, it is above
all trying to bring about a suspension of militant communism, to usher in a
period free of class conflict, to de-politicize the life of its citizens as much as
possible. . . . An attempt is being made to arrest the dynamic of revolutionary
progress in the life of the state—one has entered, like it or not, a period of res-
toration while nonetheless wanting to store up the revolutionary energy of the
youth like electricity in a battery.31
Even though Benjamin’s enthusiasm for the Soviet Union decreased after
his visit, he still believed that revolution was around the corner. The Great
Depression seemed to confirm that capitalism was entering its death throes.
In April 1931, he wrote to Gerhard Scholem about the possibilities for a
“German Bolshevist revolution. . . . It is instead something that corresponds
to the circumstances.”32 A few months later, Benjamin predicted that the revo-
lution was imminent: “I consider it very doubtful that we will have to wait
longer than fall for the start of civil war.”33
However, the Nazi victory dashed Benjamin’s hope of a Soviet Germany.
His already desperate financial situation was made even worse by exile. In
October 1935, he wrote to Horkheimer asking for help: “My situation is as
difficult as any financial position that does not involve debts can possibly be.
In saying this, I do not mean to, ascribe the slightest credit to myself, but only
to say that any help you give me will produce immediate relief.”34
Considering his precarious position and the menace of fascism, it was only
natural that Benjamin looked to the Soviet Union for rescue. In “The Author
as Producer” (1934), he praised Soviet socialism for reviving literature. The
following year, Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” deplored how fascists turned politics into a meaningless spec-
tacle. He openly supported the communist mobilization of artists and intel-
lectuals for the anti-fascist struggle:
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without

affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism
sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance
126 C
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to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations;

Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical
result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation
of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its
counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production
of ritual values. . . . This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering
aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.35
Despite his rapprochement with the Soviet Union, Benjamin still followed
Trotsky’s writings. Even in his pro-Soviet “Author as a Producer,” Trotsky
was approvingly quoted.36 In 1932, Benjamin wrote to Gretel Adorno about
his excitement upon reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and
My Life: “I was otherwise totally immersed in things Russian for fourteen
days; I have just read Trotsky’s history of the February Revolution and am
about to finish reading his autobiography. I think it has been years since I
have consumed anything with such breathless excitement.”37
Benjamin found that he had difficulty comprehending Soviet develop-
ments. Shortly after the first show trial, he wrote to Horkheimer that he
could not understand it: “I am naturally following events in Russia very
closely. And it seems to me that I am not the only one who is at the end of
his rope.”38 In exile, Benjamin spent a great deal of time with Brecht where
they discussed the Soviet Union. Both men followed Trotsky’s work to help
them make sense of Stalinism. According to Benjamin: “Brecht was fol-
lowing the developments in Russia, as well as Trotsky’s writings. To him,
they were proof that there was reason for suspicion—a justified suspicion
demanding a skeptical view of Russian affairs.”39 Brecht noted the degenera-
tion of the revolution was a fact but told Benjamin that they still needed to
support the USSR:
[Brecht said “in] Russia, a dictatorship rules over the proletariat. So long as this
dictatorship is still bringing practical benefits to the proletariat-that is, so long
as it contributes to the balancing out between proletariat and farmers, with an
emphasis on proletarian interests—we should not give up on it.” Several days
later, Brecht spoke of a “workers’ monarchy”—and I drew an analogy between
such an organism and the grotesque freaks of nature which, in the shape of
horned fish or other monsters, are brought to light from out of the deep sea.40
Benjamin agreed with Brecht that the Soviet Union was worth supporting on
anti-fascist grounds. In a letter to Horkheimer, Benjamin explained his agree-
ment with Brecht:
We have up to now been able to view the Soviet Union as a power that does
not determine its foreign policy according to imperialist interests-hence as an
anti-imperialist power. We continue to do so, at least for now, because-despite

the gravest possible reservations-we still view the Soviet Union as the agent of
our interests in a coming war, as well as in the delaying of this war; I assume
that this corresponds to your sense of the situation. That this agent is the costliest
imaginable, in that we have to pay for it with sacrifices diminishing the interests
that matter most to us as producers, Brecht would never think of disputing.41
However, Benjamin believed that political isolation had taken its toll on
Brecht’s cultural work. He noted that Brecht’s poetic praise for the Soviet
Union resembled the propagandistic dishonesty of National Socialism:
Blücher points out very rightly that certain passages in the Lesebuch für
Städtebewohner are no more than formulations of the methods of the GPU. This
confirms, from a point of view opposite to my own, what I call the prophetic
character of these poems. The fact is that in the verses I am referring to, we can
indeed see the procedures in which the worst elements of the Communist party
resonate with the most unscrupulous ones of National Socialism. . . . It is pos-
sible that contact with revolutionary workers could have prevented Brecht from
poetically transfiguring the dangerous and momentous errors into which GPU
practices had led the workers’ movement.42
As time passed, Benjamin grew doubtful about whether the Soviet Union was
truly interested in fighting fascism. He observed that in Spain, the Loyalist
struggle against Franco was being hamstrung by Stalin: “As for me, to put
it bluntly, I hardly know anymore where to get an idea of sensible suffering
and dying . . . revolutionary thought in Spain [is] being compromised by
the Machiavellianism of the Russian leadership and the indigenous leader-
ship’s worship of Mammon.”43 In line with his earlier anti-parliamentarism,
Benjamin was skeptical about the popular front in France. He complained to
Fritz Lieb that it was a right-wing policy: “If, however, you want to continue
to advance your view of the politics of the People’s Front, take a look at the
French leftist press: all of the leftists cling only to the fetish of the ‘leftist’
majority and it does not bother them that this majority pursues a politics with
which the rightists would provoke revolts.”44
While Benjamin believed that the struggle against fascism required
compromises in order to prevail, nothing prepared him for the shock of the
Nazi-Soviet Pact. For Benjamin, this was nothing less than a betrayal of
the anti-fascist cause by Stalin. His final work, Theses on the Philosophy of
History (1940) marked his final break with the Soviet Union. Benjamin’s
work was grounded in pessimism since World War II seemed to falsify all
philosophies of progress. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Benjamin criticized
the Enlightenment, but there was a crucial difference between them. While
the former two sank into quietism, Benjamin looked for divine intervention.
128 C
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Benjamin rejected both social democracy and Stalinist communism with

their ideologies of progress. When it came to the social democrats, Benjamin
noted that they saw progress as just the ever-accumulation of votes, which
produced opportunism and a fetish for legality. This vision of progress para-
lyzed their revolutionary will, ending in social democracy’s disastrous defeat
of 1933. Stalinism was also drenched in the same Marxist-Enlightenment
philosophy of progress. Soviet progress bred subservience in communists,
leaving them unprepared for Stalin’s betrayal:
It has the intention, at a moment wherein the politicians in whom the opponents
of Fascism had placed their hopes have been knocked supine, and have sealed
their downfall by the betrayal of their own cause, of freeing the political child of
the world from the nets in which they have ensnared it. The consideration starts
from the assumption that the stubborn faith in progress of these politicians, their
trust in their “base in the masses” and finally their servile subordination into an
uncontrollable apparatus have been three sides of the same thing.45
For Benjamin, progress was a “storm” that led to disaster and fascism. He
said that socialists should abandon any Enlightenment ideas of progress.
Instead, the socialist revolution should be viewed as a “messianic zero-hour”
that rescued the proletariat from calamity and would settle accounts with
oppressors for all time.46 Benjamin’s final work represented his unanswered
prayer for deliverance.
D. BERTOLT BRECHT
More than any other Western Marxist, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht
embodied the anguish that came from supporting Stalinism. In the name of
anti-fascism, he backed the Soviet Union and remained silent about Stalin’s
crimes. Yet Brecht’s own independence of mind meant he was truly torn
about the high price of historical necessity.
As one of the rising stars of avant-garde theater in Weimar Germany, Brecht
explored working-class themes in his plays such as The Threepenny Opera.
While he had sympathized with the revolutionary left since his teens, Brecht
did not begin reading Marx until 1926. Now, Brecht said, that he finally
understood his own work: “When I read Marx’s Capital I understood my
plays. Naturally I want to see this book widely circulated. It wasn’t of course
that I found I had unconsciously written a whole pile of Marxist plays; but
this man Marx was the only spectator for my plays I’d ever come across.”47
To learn more about Marxism, Brecht sought out teachers such as the phi-
losopher Karl Korsch. A former member of the Communist Party, Korsch was
the author of Marxism and Philosophy (1923), one of the founding texts of
Western Marxism. Brecht eagerly listened to Korsch’s lectures on the “Great
Method” (or dialectical materialism). The two remained lifelong friends, with
Brecht telling Korsch in 1945: “you are my teacher for life.”48
While Korsch kept his distance from the KPD and the Soviet Union, Brecht
gravitated toward both. The catalyst for this turn was Berlin’s “Bloody May
Day” of 1929 when social democratic police killed thirty-two protesters at a
communist-led demonstration. Brecht was at an apartment near KPD head-
quarters and witnessed the massacre from a window. Fritz Sternberg, who was
there, remembered Brecht’s stunned reaction: “When Brecht heard the shots
and saw that people were being hit, he turned white in the face in a way that
I’d never seen him before in my life. I think it was not least this experience
that drove him ever more strongly towards the Communists.”49 While Brecht
never joined the KPD, the event solidified his support for communism.
Afterward, Brecht ridiculed the social democrats who placed their hopes
in legality and reform. He believed that their defense of the unreformable
Weimar Republic paved the way for fascism. Brecht claimed that bourgeois
democracy was a facade that only protected the property of a few and that the
only way to uproot capitalism was through force:
Warn us not to oppose White terror with Red.

Day after day, we said, our newspaper has written against individual
acts of
terror
But also day after day it has written: we shall prevail
Only if we make a united Red Front.
Comrades, acknowledge now that the “lesser evil”
With which for years you have been kept out of any sort of struggle
Will very soon come to mean tolerance of the Nazis.50
As early as 1927, Brecht was a firm supporter of Stalin against Trotsky. In

the Me-Ti, Brecht said that “socialism in one country” was the most practi-
cal course for the Soviet Union. Me-Ti is a book about the challenges of the
socialist movement in the form of a Chinese allegory:
To-tsi declared it impossible to create order in one country. Ni-en set about cre-
ating it. To-tsi always found this and that was missing, Ni-en provided it. To-tsi
didn’t think it possible to create order unless simultaneously in all countries.
Ni-en thought it possible to create order in all countries if it was created in
one. To-tsi planned for an upheaval in all countries and then for creating order
in all countries. Ni-en began to create order in his country and knew it would
cause upheaval in all countries. As a student of Ka-meh, Ni-en believed in the
importance of the economy, of industry, in the firm organization of the largest
130 C
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number on the basis of a new economic order in one country for an upheaval
in all countries.51
Even though Brecht had taken sides with Stalin, he still held Trotsky in high
regard. As Benjamin recalled in 1931: “The conversation turned to Trotsky;
Brecht maintained there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the
greatest living European writer.”52 As shown in the Benjamin section, Brecht
closely followed Trotsky’s work in exile.
For most of his life, Brecht never expressed any public criticisms toward
Stalin. He believed in the absolute necessity of a common front with the KPD
and the Soviet Union. To that end, Brecht refused to fire on his own side. As
his biographer Stephen Parker noted: “However, already in 1928 Brecht was
at pains not to divulge differences in public which the real political enemy
could exploit. To the frustration of those many enemies, throughout his life
Brecht would make every effort to maintain a loyal front with his political
allies despite their differences.”53
Until Hitler’s ascension to power, Brecht believed that the KPD would
create a Soviet Germany. After being forced into exile, he soberly recognized
the enormity of defeat. Brecht realized that a long period of struggle lay
ahead and that it was even more essential to maintain a solid front with the
Communists. As he told the Soviet writer Sergei Tretiakov in October 1933:
The time for spectacular proclamations, protests etc. is over for the moment.
What is needed now is patient, persistent, painstaking educational work as well
as study. Among other things, we (Kläber, myself and a few others) have tried
to set up an archive for the study of Fascism. Of course it’s all very difficult.
I keep hearing that I’ve become a Fascist or Trotskyist or Buddhist or God
knows what.54
Brecht’s desire for anti-fascist unity seemed to become a reality in 1935

when the Comintern adopted the popular front. Brecht supported the KPD’s
effort to create the Volksfront by writing plays, poems, and songs. For
example, the song “Einheitsfrontlied” with lyrics written by Brecht and its
melody composed by Hanns Eisler, was one of the most famous anthems
of the German labor movement and international volunteers in the Spanish
Civil War:
And because the prole is a prole

No one else can set him free.
It’s the work of the working class alone
To fight for liberty.
By the left, two, three! By the left, two, three!
Comrade, there’s a place for you
In the ranks of the Workers’ United Front

For you’re a worker too.‌‌‌‌‌55
Yet Brecht’s ideas on culture, particularly epic theater, were at odds with the
Soviet orthodoxy of “socialist realism.” He often found himself clashing with
cultural critics such as Georg Lukács.
Brecht also disagreed with the Comintern’s new understandings of fascism.
The popular front declared that fascism was only the policy of the most reac-
tionary elements of finance capital and not capitalism itself. This definition
meant communists could pursue alliances with not only social democrats, but
“anti-fascist” and progressive sections of the capitalist class. Brecht’s view
of fascism was predicated on understanding its links to capitalism. For him,
an anti-fascist strategy required anticapitalism: “Any proclamation against
fascism which refrains from dealing with the social relations from which this
arose as a natural necessity is lacking in sincerity. Those who do not want to
give up the private ownership of the means of production, far from getting rid
of fascism, have need of its services.”56
Brecht sincerely advocated unity with social democrats to fight fascism,
but he expected that communists would be the leading force. Communist
leadership was necessary to ensure that a revolutionary program would be
pursued. In the popular front, communists were moderating their goals to
appeal to social democrats. Brecht believed that this was a mistake since
reformists were incapable of defeating fascism:
Social Democracy has no vision of the future. . . . The only match for Fascist
ideals are socialist ideals, the genuinely socialist ones. You do not win by hiding
your good qualities. . . . Because Social Democracy always backs away from the
Communists, when they propagate socialist ideals, denouncing them as Utopian
and as a danger to the working and middle classes; because Social Democracy
itself thus produces a fear of Communism and, with it, of socialism too!57
Even though Brecht was uneasy with the popular front, it was the Great
Terror that truly tormented him. He helplessly watched as German émigrés
were caught up in the madness. Fellow writers such as Heinrich Meyer were
arrested and shot in 1937. Brecht’s friend Asja Lācis and his former lover
Carola Neher were both arrested as well. Brecht tried to help Neher, writing
to the fellow traveler and writer Lion Feuchtwanger. However, he made sure
to buttress his appeal to Feuchtwanger by restating his absolute loyalty to the
Soviet Union: “Incidentally, please treat this request of mine confidentially,
because I neither want to sow distrust of the Soviet Union nor give certain
people a chance of accusing me of doing so.”58
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While Brecht was concerned about the fate of his friends, he remained
publicly supportive of the purges. As an editor of the émigré paper Das Wort,
Brecht published essays by writers such as Willi Bredel and Martin Andersen
Nexø that supported the Moscow Trials. When Feuchtwanger wrote Moscow
1937, an apologia for the purges, Brecht applauded it as a wonderful book:
“I think your ‘Die Russia’ is the best thing to have appeared on the subject
in Europe.”59
In private, Brecht wrote an unpublished essay, “On the Moscow Trials” in
1938 where he defended the trials for wiping out fascist traitors:
The trials have demonstrated with total clarity, even in the minds of convinced
opponents of the Soviet Union and of their governments, that there is an active
conspiracy against the regime, and that these nests of conspirators have not only
committed acts of sabotage internally, but have also had dealings with Fascist
diplomats regarding the attitude of their governments to a possible change of
regime in the Union. Their politics was grounded in defeatism and had the
spread of defeatism as its object.60
In another unpublished work “On My Attitude to the Soviet Union,” Brecht

condemned unnamed critics of the USSR which likely included Trotsky. He
said that their criticisms of Stalin weakened the struggle against fascism.
Brecht believed that their anti-Stalinism was so ferocious that they would
not support the Soviet Union in war if it meant Stalin would emerge as
the victor.61
Is it possible that Brecht had some lingering doubts about the validity of
the Moscow Trials? A partial answer can be gleaned from Brecht’s visit to the
philosopher Sidney Hook in New York City in 1936 which took place after
the first trial. Hook asked Brecht whether the murder of innocent comrades
was acceptable to him. Brecht responded: “As for them, the more innocent
they are, the more they deserve to be shot.”62 On the surface, this declaration
seems like Merleau-Ponty’s argument that the defendants were objectively
guilty regardless of their subjective intentions. However, the philosopher
Slavoj Žižek offers an alternative and anti-Stalinist reading of Brecht: “it
can be read as its opposite, in a radically anti-Stalinist way: if they were in
a position to plot and execute the execution of Stalin and his entourage, and
were ‘innocent’ (that is, they did not grasp the opportunity), they effectively
deserved to die for failing to rid us of Stalin.”63 Yet this reinterpretation does
not align with the majority of Brecht’s public or private statements in support
of Stalin or the trials.
Brecht’s overall defense of Stalin and the purges did not mean he was not
troubled by developments in the Soviet Union. He asked: does the struggle
against a cruel reality demand the use of even greater cruelty to overthrow
it? In a poem, “To those born after” (1939) he pondered this question of ends
and means:
And yet we know:

Hatred, even of meanness
Makes you ugly.
Anger, even at injustice
Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.
You, however, when the time comes
When mankind is a helper unto mankind
Think on us
With forbearance.64
Stalinist crimes may be murderous and cruel, but Brecht thought that they
were the price humanity had to pay to reach communism. His poem asked
future generations in a liberated world to be generous in their judgment of
what was historically necessary to arrive at that future.
Brecht’s play Life of Galileo (1938) served as a veiled allegory of the
purges and the Soviet Union. Set in the sixteenth century, the play follows
the life of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was tried by the Roman
Catholic Church for proving that the earth revolved around the sun. In the
end, Galileo accepts the Church’s judgment that the earth was the center of
the universe. Yet he supports his daughter when she smuggles his scientific
studies out of Italy. When she praises her father’s actions as heroic, Galileo
insists his motives were not noble, but based upon self-interest. He does
not believe that humanity was mature enough for the truth, so he recanted
because he lacked the courage of his convictions:
As a scientist, I had an almost unique opportunity. In my day astronomy

emerged into the market place. At that particular time, had one put up a fight, it
could have had wide repercussions. I have come to believe that I was never in
real danger, for some years I was as strong as the authorities, and I surrendered
my knowledge to the powers that be, to use it, no, not to use it, abuse it, as it
suits their ends. I have betrayed my profession. Any man who does what I have
done must not be tolerated in the ranks of science.65
Brecht’s Galileo acts as a stand-in for Bukharin, since both capitulated to

higher authorities out of self-interest. This also made Stalin into a stand-in
for the Catholic Church since both were opposed to independent thinking.
As Benjamin noted: “Brecht speaks of his profound hatred of clerics—an
antipathy inherited from his grandmother. He makes it clear that those who
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have appropriated and used Marx’s theoretical doctrines will always form a
clerical camarilla.”66 Korsch noted that Galileo showed Brecht’s doubts about
Stalinism: “Although people seldom organise their private lives according to
the principles of their general convictions, after this depiction of Galileo I
cannot think that Brecht will continue to be so faithful to the line.”67 Korsch
expected an imminent break between Brecht and the KPD.
Yet Brecht’s play was not an anti-Stalinist work, but in certain ways it was a
dramatic presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s argument about objective guilt and
subjective innocence. Galileo did not set out to oppose the establishment, but
his opposition inevitably ended up challenging the Church. As Brecht said:
The play shows the contemporary victory of authority, not the victory of the
priesthood. It corresponds to the historical truth in that the Galileo of the play
never turns directly against the church. . . . Casting the church as the embodi-
ment of authority in this theatrical trial of the persecutors of the champions of
free research certainly does not help to get the church acquitted. But it would
be highly dangerous, particularly nowadays, to treat the matter like Galileo’s
fight for freedom of research as a religious one; for thereby attention would be
most unhappily deflected from present-day reactionary authorities of a totally
unecclesiastical kind.68
These remarks by Brecht are similar to Bukharin’s final speech at his trial:
I said, and I now repeat, that I was a leader and not a cog in the counter-revo-
lutionary affairs. It follows from this, as will be clear to everybody, that there
were many specific things which I could not have known, and which I actually
did not know, but that this does not relieve me of responsibility.69
Brecht acknowledged that Bukharin may have spoken the truth, but humanity
was not ready to hear it. Since his time had not come, Bukharin like Galileo,
willingly submitted to authority and paid a harsh price. This was a dilemma
of historical necessity that Brecht recognized, but could see no escape from.
As Deutscher notes, Bukharin and Brecht’s Galileo both went “down on
[their] knees before the Inquisition and doing this from an ‘historic necessity,’
because of the people’s spiritual and political immaturity.”70
In discussions on the USSR, Benjamin realized that Brecht was torn. On
the one hand, Brecht believed that the trials were legitimate: “There’s no
doubt that on the other side, in Russia itself, certain criminal cliques are at
work. Every so often, this becomes apparent from their horrendous crimes.”71
On the other hand, Brecht said that the Soviet Union had lost its way and
was no longer advancing toward communism: “‘The state must vanish.’ Who
says this? The state.’ (By this, he can mean only the Soviet Union.) Brecht,
looking cunning and shifty, steps in front of the armchair I’m sitting in and,
pretending to be ‘the state,’ says, with a sideways leer at an imaginary cli-

ent: ‘I know—I’m supposed to vanish.’”72 Brecht even repeated Trotsky’s
criticisms about the impossibility of building socialism in one country, but
believed that Soviet deformities such as the cult of personality were inevi-
table due to the unfavorable international situation:
The socialist economy doesn’t need war, and that’s why it can’t stand war. The
“love of peace” felt by the “Russian people” expresses this, and only this. There
can be no socialist economy in any single country. The Russian proletariat was,
by necessity, dealt a severe setback by rearmament—and, what’s more, was
thrown back to long-superseded stages of historical development. Monarchy,
among others. In Russia, personal authority reigns supreme. Obviously, only
idiots could deny this.73
Whatever Brecht’s criticisms of the Soviet Union, he rejected any compari-

son to Nazi Germany. In 1935, he scolded Bernard von Brentano for doing
just that: “How can you call the Bolsheviks fascists? Do fascists abolish
the private ownership of the means of production? Do fascists establish and
maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat?”74
Brecht’s contradictory view of Stalin was evidenced in his poem, “The
farmer’s address to his ox” a satire about a Soviet monarchy and its relation-
ship with the peasantry:
O great ox, divine puller of the plough

Deign to plough straight! Preserve the furrows
Please, from confusion! You
Go before us, our leader, giddyup!
We bent down low to cut your fodder
Deign now to consume it, dearest provider! Don’t trouble yourself
While eating, about the furrows, just eat!
For your barn, O protector of the family
We dragged, groaning, the timber, we
Sleep in the damp, you in the dry. Yesterday
You coughed, beloved pacesetter.
We were beside ourselves. You’re not going to
Peg out, are you, before the sowing, you dog?75
While Stalin was purposely not named, Brecht told Benjamin that the poem
was meant as a tribute to the General Secretary. Yet Brecht’s poem was filled
with irony since he recognized the price of historical necessity. As Benjamin
noted: “But Stalin wasn’t dead yet. And Brecht himself was not entitled to
offer a different, more enthusiastic tribute; he was sitting in exile waiting for
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the Red Army.”76 For all his crimes, Brecht saw Stalin as the only hope for
liberating his homeland from Hitler.
Like other émigrés, Brecht was stunned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact and
remained unwell for days afterward. Once Brecht composed himself, he justi-
fied the pact as a necessary measure for the Soviet Union to rearm itself. Yet
he understood that many communists would see it as a sellout:
the russo-german pact created much confusion among the proletariat every-
where. . . . the [Soviet] union will in the eyes of the proletariat of the world bear
the terrible stigma of aiding and abetting Fascism, the wildest element in capi-
talism and the most hostile to the workers. i don’t think more can be said than
that the [Soviet] union saved its skin at the cost of leaving the world proletariat
without any solutions, hope or solidarity.77
As war drew closer to him, Brecht left Europe for America. His departure
came just days before the start of Operation Barbarossa. Now that the USSR
was fighting, this was Brecht’s war. In the United States, Brecht did what
he could for the war effort. He cowrote the screenplay for Fritz Lang’s film
Hangmen Also Die! (1942) about the assassination of SS officer Reinhard
Heydrich by anti-fascist partisans in Prague. Brecht also joined the National
Committee for a Free Germany formed by exiled communists and Wehrmacht
POWs in the USSR.
Brecht’s radical politics and public sympathy for the Soviet Union meant
he was under constant surveillance by the FBI. Once the Cold War began,
the blacklist made it impossible for him to remain in the United States.
After testifying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in
1947, Brecht returned to Europe. In 1949, he was welcomed by the German
Democratic Republic (DDR), where he set up his theater company, the
Berliner Ensemble.
Even though Brecht may be the only person who ever emigrated to East
Germany for artistic freedom, his works were still heavily scrutinized by
the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Like his time in Moscow, the SED
demanded that Brecht conform to the dictates of socialist realism. Brecht
genuinely listened to the party’s criticisms, but he was often frustrated by
their cultural ignorance.
Brecht thought that the SED’s fear of those outside its control was genu-
ine since many Germans were still influenced by bourgeois and Nazi ideas.
Brecht believed that a new democratic culture was necessary to truly denazify
Germany. However, the party’s heavy-handedness made that increasingly dif-
ficult to achieve. Furthermore, living conditions in East Germany remained
abysmal, which served to breed anger toward the SED and socialism.
In June 1953, these frustrations finally boiled over into popular revolt. In
East Berlin, a strike by construction workers grew into an armed uprising. It
took intervention by the Red Army to fully suppress the revolt. A few days
after the tanks rolled in, Brecht publicly rallied to the SED:
On the morning of 17 June, when it became clear that the workers’ demonstra-
tions were being used for the purposes of war-mongering, I expressed my com-
mitment to the Socialist Unity Party. I hope now that the provocateurs are being
isolated and their lines of communication cut. At the same time, however, I hope
that the workers who demonstrated out of justified dissatisfaction will not be
equated with the provocateurs, so that the great debate concerning the mistakes
made on all sides, which is so urgently needed, will not be rendered impossible
from the outset.78
Brecht makes it clear in his statement that he distinguished between the work-
ers’ genuine demands and anti-communist agitators. He hoped that the party
would satisfy those demands and only go after the guilty. Brecht recognized
that the SED’s divorce from the people had created the conditions for the
uprising. Later, in his poem “The Solution,” Brecht satirized the govern-
ment’s response:
After the uprising of 17 June

On the orders of the Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Leaflets were distributed in the Stalinallee
Which read: that the people
Had forfeited the government’s trust
And only by working twice as hard
Could they win it back. But would it not
Be simpler if the government
Dissolved the people and
Elected another one?79
The Berlin uprising had occurred just a few months after Stalin’s death. When
the General Secretary died, Brecht eulogized him as the personification of the
communist ideal for people across the world: “The oppressed people of five
continents, those who have already liberated themselves, and all those who
are fighting for world peace, must have felt their hearts miss a beat when they
heard that Stalin was dead. He was the embodiment of their hopes. But the
intellectual and material weapons which he produced remain, and with them
the method to produce new ones.”80
Until the end of his life in 1956, Brecht wrestled with Stalinism. After
Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, he wrote “On the Criticism of Stalin” recogniz-
ing the need for Marxist criticism of Stalin. When it came to Stalin’s methods,
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Brecht still said that they were historically necessary since capitalism could
only be overcome with barbarism. Yet he realized that Stalin’s means contra-
dicted the end goal of communism. Now that Stalin was dead, Brecht hoped
that Stalinism had outlived its usefulness. He was optimistic that the Chinese
Revolution would renew the promise of communism that had been so tainted
by Stalinism: “The second time around (in China) it will already be somewhat
easier, and the same applies to less backward countries, where the original
accumulation of capital is already more advanced.”81
Brecht was not a mindless follower of Stalinism. As a great Marxist writer,
he expressed Stalinism’s promises, betrayals, and cynicism more lyrically
than any party resolution ever could. Brecht accepted Stalinism’s logic of his-
torical necessity, but he was not blind to the cost. While Stalinism burdened
Brecht, in the end he simply could see no other alternative.
E. HERBERT MARCUSE
In contrast to other Western Marxists who were silent, if not outright support-
ive, of the Soviet Union, Herbert Marcuse was never attracted to Stalinism.
However, he shared the Frankfurt School’s general pessimism about the
prospects for socialist revolution, believing that the Western working class
was hopelessly bought off. Never giving up on revolution, Marcuse searched
in vain for “substitute proletarians” to realize communism.
Marcuse also has the unique distinction of being one of the few Western
Marxists who participated in an actual revolution. After serving in the
German army in World War I, he was radicalized and joined the Social
Democratic Party (SPD). He was a member of the soldiers’ councils that
covered the country after the Kaiser’s overthrow in 1918. Marcuse resigned
his membership in the SPD in disgust after they approved the murders of
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg: “In 1917 to 1918 I was a member
of the Social Democratic Party, I resigned from it after the murder of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and from then on I have criticized this
party’s politics. . . . The reason was rather that it worked in alliance with
reactionary, destructive, and repressive forces.”82
While he maintained his left-wing politics, Marcuse never joined another
socialist organization. He admired the Soviet Union until Lenin’s death in
1924, but he considered Stalin to be the gravedigger of the revolution.83
Marcuse focused on academic research, particularly the study of philosophy,
where his teachers included Martin Heidegger. Marcuse was especially inter-
ested in the Hegelian roots of Marxism and wrote one of the earliest studies
of Marx’s previously unpublished Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
in 1932.84
Shortly after joining the Frankfurt School in 1932, Hitler came to power,
and Marcuse left for American exile. In the United States, Marcuse was
one of the leading lights of the Frankfurt School. Working closely with
Horkheimer, he came to doubt the historical mission of the working class.
In his essay “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the
State” (1934), Marcuse said:
It was not with Hegel’s death but only now that the Fall of the Titans of German
philosophy occurs. At that time, in the nineteenth century, its decisive achieve-
ments were preserved in a new form in scientific social theory and the critique
of political economy. Today the fate of the labor movement, in which the heri-
tage of this philosophy was preserved, is clouded with uncertainty.85
As the Soviet Union sank into Stalinism and World War II approached,
Marcuse wondered if socialism could save the world from barbarism: “What,
however, if the development outlined by the theory does not occur? What
if the forces that were to bring about the transformation are suppressed and
appear to be defeated?”86
During these years, Marcuse was more directly engaged with Marxist
theory than either Adorno or Horkheimer. In 1941, he published Reason and
Revolution, where he discussed Hegel’s ideas and their influence on both
Marx and Lenin. In contrast to Stalinist orthodoxy that claimed Hegel was
the philosopher of aristocratic reaction and fascism, Marcuse defended him
as an Enlightenment thinker: “Hegel’s philosophy was an integral part of the
culture which authoritarianism had to overcome. It is therefore no accident
that the National Socialist assault on Hegel begins with the repudiation of
his political theory.”87 In the epilogue of Reason and Revolution written
in 1954, Marcuse claimed that the working class had lost its revolutionary
potential, becoming integrated into capitalism: “But then the development of
capitalist productivity stopped the development of revolutionary conscious-
ness. Technological progress multiplied the needs and satisfactions, while
its utilization made the needs as well as their satisfactions repressive: they
themselves sustain submission and domination.”88 A decade later in The
One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse would fully develop these ideas on
working-class integration.
When the United States entered World War II, Marcuse and several
Frankfurt School alumni joined the Office for Strategic Services (OSS).
Years later, Marcuse was condemned by radicals for working with a forerun-
ner of the CIA, but remained unapologetic about his involvement: “If critics
reproach me for that, it only shows the ignorance of these people who seem
to have forgotten that the war then was a war against fascism and that, con-
sequently, I haven’t the slightest reason for being ashamed of having assisted
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in it.”89 Following the war, Marcuse continued his government service in the
State Department as a political analyst. He said that the Allies should support
the German labor movement as part of the denazification process.
In 1947, Marcuse returned to Germany where he met Heidegger and the
two exchanged a series of letters. After Heidegger refused to apologize for
supporting Hitler and compared the Allied expulsion of Germans from east-
ern Europe to the Holocaust, Marcuse was irate:
Even further: how is it possible to equate the torture, the maiming, and the
annihilation of millions of men with the forcible relocation of population groups
who suffered none of these outrages (apart perhaps from several exceptional
instances)? From a contemporary perspective, there seems already to be a night
and day difference in humanity and inhumanity in the difference between Nazi
concentration camps and the deportations and internments of the postwar years.90
Following these words, Marcuse ended all further communication with

Heidegger.
Until 1951, Marcuse worked in the State Department, writing reports on
communism. When he left, McCarthyism was at its height, and government
agencies were being purged of suspected radicals. Marcuse did not believe
he suffered any persecution due to his politics.91 He returned to academia,
continuing research and writing for the remainder of his life.
After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, Marcuse wrote Soviet Marxism (1958),
his appraisal of the USSR, stating that it was not socialist in the sense envi-
sioned by Marx and Engels. He said that the Soviet Union was ruled by a
noncapitalist bureaucracy.92 Marcuse listed several reasons why this bureau-
cracy was not a new ruling class. First: the party and state bureaucracies
competed with one another to maintain their own specific interests. Second:
the system of terror kept any faction from becoming hegemonic and squeezed
others out. Third: all factions of the bureaucracy had a vested interest in rap-
idly developing the means of production. Therefore, the planned economy
helped to overcome any conflicting interests within the bureaucracy. Marcuse
said an identity existed between the bureaucracy and the interests of Soviet
society, albeit in “hypostatized” form.93
In regards to the future of the Soviet Union, Marcuse shared Isaac
Deutscher’s optimism about the prospects of de-Stalinization. He said that
the intervention in Hungary would not stop the process of gradual reform:
The Eastern European events were likely to slow down and perhaps even reverse
de-Stalinization in some fields; particularly in international strategy, a consider-
able “hardening” has become apparent. However, if our analysis is correct, the
fundamental trend will continue and reassert itself throughout such reversals.
With respect to internal Soviet developments, this means at present continuation
of “collective leadership,” decline in the power of the secret police, decentral-

ization, legal reforms, relaxation in censorship, liberalization in cultural life.94
When it came to its foreign policy, Marcuse believed that socialism in one
country was the only realistic choice for the USSR. In line with his earlier
views, he argued that the Western working class could not save the Soviet
Union because it had lost its revolutionary potential. Since revolution in the
West was not possible, this left no alternative except socialism in one country:
Has not Marxian theory then lost the mass basis required for its realization?
And is not the connection between theory and reality also lost, unless the former
redefines itself by redefining the latter? These questions seem to have driven
Leninist theory toward a reevaluation of contemporary capitalist development,
which has become the theoretical foundation for the doctrine of “socialism in
one country.”95
As a result, the Soviet Union operated under the assumption of permanent

capitalist stabilization. Since the Western Communist Parties followed the
Soviet lead, they readily accepted the role of legal opposition parties instead
of revolutionary vanguards.
Marcuse believed that the sorry fate of the supposedly revolutionary
Communist Parties proved how deep the working class was integrated into
the capitalist West. As he wrote in the One-Dimensional Man:
If they have agreed to work within the framework of the established system, it
is not merely on tactical grounds and as short-range strategy, but because their
social base has been weakened and their objectives altered by the transforma-
tion of the capitalist system (as have the objectives of the Soviet Union which
has endorsed this change in policy). These national Communist parties play the
historical role of legal opposition parties “condemned” to be non-radical. They
testify to the depth and scope of capitalist integration, and to the conditions
which make the qualitative difference of conflicting interests appear as quantita-
tive differences within the established society.96
Unlike the working class, Marcuse said that students, racial minorities, and
other outsiders were not incorporated into capitalism, but “exist outside the
democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need
for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is
revolutionary even if their consciousness is not.”97 Marcuse looked to these
substitute proletariats to lead revolution in the West.
In the 1960s, large swaths of the New Left looked to Marcuse for inspi-
ration. Student protesters held up banners with the words “Marx, Mao,
Marcuse.” Some of his students, such as Angela Davis, were prominent in the
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various protest movements. Marcuse himself welcomed this radicalism and

the struggle against the Vietnam War. This was in marked contrast to others in
the Frankfurt School who were downright hostile to the students. Horkheimer
had become a bitter anti-communist who supported the Vietnam War in order
to halt China. Adorno’s initial sympathy dissipated since he believed that
student militancy was a sign of red fascism. In January 1969, Adorno called
the police to remove protesters from his classroom so he could continue a
lecture. Marcuse chastised Adorno for refusing to side with student radicals:
“And I would despair about myself (us) if I (we) would appear to be on the
side of a world that supports mass murder in Vietnam, or says nothing about
it, and which makes a hell of any realms that are outside the reach of its own
repressive power.”98
In the end, Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” ran aground once sixties radical-
ism ebbed. Marcuse admitted that this was always a possibility: “The critical
theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between
the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it
remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope,
have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.”99 Marcuse’s theory of
working-class integration into bourgeois society left him in a cul-de-sac with-
out a social agent for revolution. He could only wait in desperate hope for a
spontaneous and libidinal revolt to end capitalism.
F. GEORG LUKÁCS
Among Western Marxists, Georg Lukács symbolizes the “good Thermidorian,”

who willingly made his peace with Stalinism. Like Brecht, Lukács saw
Stalinism as the only realistic alternative if the Soviet Union was going to
build socialism and defeat fascism. However, Lukács chafed under Stalinist
censorship and repression. It was only in 1956 and his last years that Lukács
indulged forlorn hopes that the Soviet Union would quietly reform and
remove the heritage of Stalinism.
The Russian Revolution stirred the romantic imagination of the young
Lukács, who believed that the bourgeois order was facing imminent destruc-
tion. In 1918, he joined the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP) as one of
its founding members. The following year, Lukács served as Commissar of
Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.100 After
the collapse of Soviet Hungary, Lukács risked his life conducting under-
ground work for the HCP.
His revolutionary dreams remained undimmed, but also romantic. As
an editor of the leftist journal Kommunismus, Lukács’s messianic com-
munism did not go unnoticed by the Comintern. An article he wrote on
anti-parliamentarism was harshly criticized by Lenin as “very Left-wing, and

very poor. . . . It gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical
situations; it takes no account of what is most essential.”101 Lukács accepted
Lenin’s criticisms as valid, stating later: “I at once saw the force of this criti-
cism and it compelled me to revise my historical perspectives and to adjust
them more subtly and less directly to the exigencies of day-to-day tactics.”102
Even as Lukács conformed to the early Comintern’s “revolutionary real-
ism,” his writings still argued that proletarian revolution lay on the immediate
horizon. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács attempted to
provide a philosophical basis for Bolshevism by claiming that the proletariat
was the identical subject-object of history. This was a spiritualization of
material struggle where proletariat Geist replaced Hegelian Geist. History
and Class Consciousness alongside Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy
were both deemed heretical by Moscow. Grigory Zinoviev, president of the
Communist International, denounced both Lukács and Korsch at the Fifth
Congress in 1924: “If a few more of these professors come and dish out
their Marxist theories, then the cause will be in a bad way. We cannot, in our
Communist International, allow theoretical revisionism of this kind to go
unpunished.”103
As late as 1926, Lukács defended his work in the unfinished manuscript
Tailism and the Dialectic. However, he finally repudiated History and
Class Consciousness after reading Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts in 1930. According to Lukács’s 1967 preface, he attempted to
“out-Hegel Hegel” and “objectively to surpass the Master himself” by saying
the proletariat was the identical subject-object of history.104 While History
and Class Consciousness was condemned by both Lukács and the Comintern,
it enjoyed a subterranean existence as one of the founding texts of Western
Marxism, influencing Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and all the major figures of the
Frankfurt School.
After the final defeat of the German Revolution and the death of Lenin,
the Soviet Union announced the new orthodoxy of socialism in one country.
Lukács saw the wisdom of Stalin’s position and rationalized this Thermidorian
ethos in “Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics” (1926). Here,
he defended Hegel’s embrace of Thermidor as “magnificent realism” since he
disdained all utopias.105 According to Lukács, Hegel’s realism was closer to
historical materialism since he rejected the abstract and moralistic utopianism
of Fichte, Hess, von Cieszowski, and the Young Hegelians:
one of the most important achievements of Hegelian philosophy, one of the

points in which it contained the possibility of being developed further into
materialist dialectics, would nevertheless have been lost in doing so. That
possibility is, namely, the methodological possibility of acknowledging and
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recognizing the social reality of the present in its reality and yet still reacting to
it critically—not moralistically—‌‌‌‌critically, but in the sense of practical-critical
activity. In Hegel, admittedly, no more than the possibility existed. But it proved
to be decisive for the development of socialist theory that, methodologically,
Marx took over directly from Hegel at this point, purging Hegel’s method
of its idealistic inconsistencies and inaccuracies, “setting it on its feet” and,
no matter how much he owes to Feuerbach’s encouragement, rejecting the
Feuerbachian “improvement” on Hegel.106
In Lukács’s Aesopian language, the Thermidorian “realism” of Hegel is

linked to Stalin and socialism in one country, while “abstract utopianism” is
identified with Trotsky and international revolution.
Lukács’s identification with the Stalinist Thermidor is made clearer in his
1935 essay, “Hölderlin’s Hyperion” where he argues Hegel recognized that
Thermidor and Napoleon were just as necessary to the French Revolution as
Robespierre and the Terror:
The world historical significance of Hegel’s accommodation consists precisely

in the fact that he grasped . . . the revolutionary development of the bourgeoisie
as a unitary process, one in which the revolutionary Terror as well as Thermidor
and Napoleon were only necessary phases. The heroic period of the revolution-
ary bourgeoisie becomes in Hegel—just as antiquity does—something irretriev-
ably past, but a past which was absolutely necessary for the emergence of the
unheroic prose of the present considered to be progressive; for the emergence
of advanced bourgeois society with its economic and social contradictions.107
Lukács favorably contrasts Hegel’s acceptance of the Thermidor to the intran-

sigence found in Friedrich Hölderlin:
To be brief, Hegel comes to terms with the post-Thermidorian epoch and the
close of the revolutionary period of bourgeois development, and he builds up
his philosophy precisely on an understanding of this new turning-point in world
history. Hölderlin makes no compromise with the post-Thermidorian reality; he
remains faithful to the old revolutionary ideal of renovating polis democracy
and is broken by a reality which had no place for his ideals, not even on the level
of poetry and thought.108
It is arguable that these are coded observations where Lukács viewed

Hölderlin as akin to Trotsky since neither man can reconcile themselves to the
new Thermidorian reality. Lukács believed that he was in a similar position
to Hegel and must accommodate himself to the powers that be. As he told
Victor Serge in the early 1930s: “Above all . . . don’t be silly and get yourself
deported for nothing, just for the pleasure of voting defiantly. Believe me,
insults are not very important to us. Marxist revolutionaries need patience
and courage; they do not need pride. The times are bad, and we are at a dark
crossroads. Let us reserve our strength: history will summon us in its time.”109
In deference to Comintern orthodoxy, Lukács abandoned his own program
inside the HCP. For the better part of a decade, he had been involved in fac-
tional struggles inside the party with its leader Béla Kun. When Lukács put
forward his Blum Theses (1928–1929) as a new strategy, he found himself
out of step with Kun and the Communist International’s Third Period. Rather
than fight for his position, Lukács made a cynical self-criticism. He refused to
play the role of an oppositionist since it would make him politically ineffec-
tual: “I was indeed firmly convinced that I was in the right but I knew also—
e.g., from the fate that had befallen Karl Korsch—that to be expelled from
the Party meant that it would no longer be possible to participate actively in
the struggle against Fascism.”110 Lukács accepted the Stalinist Thermidor, but
this decision effectively ended his active political involvement in the HCP.
Lukács believed that the Comintern’s Third Period line was a form of
destructive sectarianism with its conflation of social democracy and fascism:
“This put an end to all prospects of a United Front on the left. Although I was
on Stalin’s side on the central issue of Russia, I was deeply repelled by his
attitude here.”111 Later, Lukács welcomed the adoption of the popular front,
where he defended bourgeois culture from the danger of fascism. As Isaac
Deutscher observed: “He elevated the Popular Front from the level of tactics
to that of ideology: he projected its principle into philosophy, literary history
and aesthetic criticism.”112
In the 1930s, Lukács lived in the Soviet Union, where his greatest struggle
was staying alive. Many of his Hungarian comrades such as Béla Kun were
executed during the purges. His stepson Ferenc Jánossy was arrested and
attempted suicide. Lukács himself was arrested as a potential spy after the
Nazi invasion in 1941. He was luckier than most and freed after the timely
intervention of Comintern President George Dimitrov and HCP leader
Mátyás Rákosi.
During these years, Lukács engaged in his own form of philosophical
resistance, writing The Young Hegel (1938). Like Marcuse, Lukács saw Hegel
as the philosophical heir to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.
According to Lukács’s student István Mészáros The Young Hegel proved his
anti-Stalinism:
But precisely the book, The Young Hegel, shows that it is quite nonsense to say
that he simply reconciled himself with Stalinism, because that book was written
explicitly against a Stalinist line on Hegel. Stalin’s line on Hegel was that it is
an aristocratic reaction against the French Revolution, and Lukács demonstrates
that it is an enthusiastic embracing of the French Revolution. In fact there
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couldn’t be even a dream of publishing it in the Soviet Union at the time when
Stalin’s line prevailed against Hegel.113
This goes a bit too far since Lukács did not openly express his anti-Stalinism.
His philosophical conscience was certainly troubled by his compromise
with Soviet orthodoxy, hence why Lukács was willing to quietly criticize
Stalin on Hegel.
After World War II, Lukács followed up his defense of Hegel with The
Destruction of Reason (1954) where he saw National Socialism emerging
from the long history of German irrationalism that had opposed the French
Revolution. While he does not paint a straight philosophical line to Hitler,
Lukács argues that the choice of philosophy is not without its consequences:
“It will be our task to bring to light all the intellectual spade-work done on
behalf of the ‘National Socialist outlook,’ however far removed (on the face
of it) from Hitlerism it may be and however little (subjectively) it may cherish
such intentions. It is one of this book’s basic theses that there is no such thing
as an ‘innocent’ philosophy. Such a thing has never existed, and especially
not in relation to our stated problem. This is so in precisely the philosophi-
cal sense: to side either with or against reason decides at the same time the
character of a philosophy as such and its role in social developments.”114 The
Destruction of Reason is not only a towering work of intellectual history, but
it declares the necessity of Marxists upholding the radical Enlightenment.
Whenever possible before 1956, Lukács refrained from publicly comment-
ing on Stalinist repression. Later, he admitted to viewing the Moscow Trials
through the prism of the French Revolution: “The trial of Danton during the
French Revolution had also involved many legal irregularities. And if Stalin
used the same weapons against Trotsky as Robespierre had used against
Danton, this cannot be judged according to current conditions since at the
time the crucial question was on which side America would intervene in the
war.”115 Lukács said this analogy could only be taken so far because Danton
died a true believer in the revolution, while Bukharin did not: “Danton was
never a traitor and never lost faith in the republic, as Robespierre claimed.
The same could not so clearly have been said of the accused in the Stalin
trials.”116
During World War II, Lukács believed that the Soviet Union represented
the forces of Enlightenment humanism over fascist reaction: “And the fas-
cist criminals know with certainty that their most dangerous and implacable
enemy is precisely socialist democracy. This is a life-and-death struggle. The
outcome of this struggle is beyond doubt. Culture will defeat barbarism.”117
He had no doubt that the USSR would prevail.
Following the war, Lukács returned home to Hungary for the first time in
over twenty years and there became a member of the Academy of Sciences.
Lukács was optimistic that the new Hungarian People’s Republic would cre-
ate a culture of people’s democracy. By 1949, anti-Titoist purges meant the
rigid enforcement of Stalinist orthodoxy throughout Eastern Europe, includ-
ing in Hungary. Lukács was now hounded by party ideologues such as László
Rudas and József Révai for his cultural tolerance, which were derided as
symptoms of “revisionism,” and “aiding imperialism.” Due to the crackdown,
Lukács feared for his life: “I had thought that in the wake of the Rajk affair
(in 1949) my own life and freedom were at stake and that I should not take
any great risk on purely literary issues.”118
Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization gave Lukács hope that there was now a
chance for liberalization. Lukács discarded his Aesopian language and openly
demanded a true settling of accounts with Stalinism. He said that condemning
the cult of personality did not go far enough, but it was necessary to look at
the social conditions that allowed Stalinism to grow: “For thinking men who
are truly devoted to the cause of progress, the problem inevitably arose out of
the social genesis of this evolutionary stage, a problem which Togliatti first
formulated precisely, when he said that it was necessary to bring to light the
social conditions in which the ‘cult of the personality’ was born and consoli-
dated.” 119
Yet Lukács still claimed that Stalinism was historically necessary. As he
said in 1962:
Since the revolutionary wave which had been unleashed in 1917 had faded
away without instituting a stable dictatorship in any other country, it was nec-
essary to confront with resolution the problem of building socialism in one
(backward) country. It is in this period that Stalin revealed himself a remarkable
and far-sighted statesman. His forceful defence of the new Leninist theory of
the possibility of a socialist society in one country against attacks mainly by
Trotsky represented, as one cannot help recognizing today, the salvation of
Soviet development. . . . What today we consider despotic and anti-democratic
in the Stalinian period, has a very close strategic relationship with Trotsky’s
fundamental ideas. A socialist society led by Trotsky would have been at least
as little democratic as Stalin’s, with the difference that strategically it would
have oriented itself through the dilemma: a catastrophic politics or capitulation,
instead of the—substantially accurate—thesis of Stalin, asserting the possibility
of socialism in one country. (The personal impressions which I formed on the
basis of my meetings with Trotsky in 1921 convinced me that, as an individual,
he was drawn towards the ‘personality cult’ even more than Stalin.) . . . With all
its errors, Stalin’s industrialization was able to create the conditions and techno-
logical requirements for winning the war against Hitler’s Germany.120
What Lukács advocated was a contradictory de-Stalinization. Since he

considered Thermidor to be an integral part of a revolutionary process, he
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condemned Stalinism for the dual “leftist” crimes of “economic subjectiv-

ism” and “revolutionary romanticism.”121 In one bizarre statement, he even
compared Stalin’s mistakes to those of Rosa Luxemburg!122 While Lukács
believed that the victims of the purges should be absolved of all guilt, he did
not think that their ideas should be rehabilitated. As he said: “This applies
above all to Trotsky, who was the principal theoretical exponent of the thesis
that the construction of socialism in a single country is impossible. History
has long ago refuted his theory.”123 Ultimately, Lukács’s criticism of Stalinism
was to remove its worst aspects while keeping the basic system intact.
In 1956, Lukács found himself swept up in something beyond a mere
reform campaign. After the Secret Speech, people in Hungary spoke freely
for the first time in years. Emboldened students and intellectuals now clam-
ored for wide-ranging liberalization. Lukács supported this movement:
The fact is that I think of 1956 as a great movement. It was a spontaneous

movement which stood in need of a certain ideology. I declared my willingness
to contribute towards formulating this in a series of lectures. For example, I
attempted to clarify whether our relationships with other countries had changed;
whether, and on what conditions, collaboration and coexistence were now an
actual possibility. So I had ideological intentions of that sort, but no other inten-
tions at all.124
In October 1956, a popular revolution led to the installation of the reformist

communist Imre Nagy as prime minister. The new Hungarian government
disbanded the secret police and promised a multiparty system. Nagy even
planned to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. For the first time in decades,
Lukács returned to active political life and joined Nagy’s government as
Minister of Culture, ironically the same position he had once held in the 1919
Soviet Republic. Overall, he was on the side of Nagy, but found his program
too vague. Lukács was opposed to Hungary withdrawing from the Warsaw
Pact since this would provoke a Soviet invasion: “I was quite simply in
favour of Hungary’s membership of the Warsaw Pact. But I also took the view
that we ought not to give the Russians an excuse to intervene in Hungarian
affairs. This consideration could not be ignored.”125
That is exactly what happened after Nagy announced that Hungary was
leaving the Warsaw Pact in November. The Soviets sent troops into Hungary
that ended the revolution. A new government was installed, led by the
pro-Soviet János Kádár. Nagy, Lukács, and other members of the revolution-
ary government were arrested and sent to Romania. His jailers demanded that
Lukács testify against Nagy: “My interrogators said to me that they knew
I was no follower of Imre Nagy and so there was no reason why I should
not testify against him. I told them that as soon as the two of us, Imre Nagy
and myself, were free to walk around Budapest, I would be happy to make
public my opinion of all of Nagy’s activities. But I was not free to express
an opinion about my fellow-prisoners.”126 Unlike Nagy, Lukács managed to
avoid execution. In 1957, he was allowed to return to Hungary and eventually
was readmitted to the party. Whatever his criticisms of Nagy, Lukács never
publicly renounced his role in the 1956 revolution.
Throughout his last years, Lukács largely focused on his literary and philo-
sophical studies. Yet he did not stay completely silent on political events.
During the Sino-Soviet split, Lukács loyally supported the Soviet Union.
In the late 1960s, he took a left turn and welcomed the student movement
as an indication of the crisis of capitalism. When the Warsaw Pact crushed
Alexander Dubček’s reformist Czechoslovak government in 1968, Lukács
was enraged. He wrote to György Aczél, a member of the Hungarian Party’s
Central Committee, threatening a return to public polemics:
I cannot agree with the solution of the Czechoslovak problem and with the
position assumed in it by the MSzMP [the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party].
Consequently, I must withdraw from the public role I played in the last few
years. I hope that developments in Hungary will not lead to such a situation in
which administrative measures against true Hungarian Marxists would force me
again into the intellectual internment of the last decade.127
The suppression of the Prague Spring spurred Lukács to write On the Process
of Democratization (1968), his own program for socialist renewal. He argued
that authentic de-Stalinization required “the genuine activation of the masses,
the surmounting of its apathy is impossible without a renaissance of the
Leninist position.”128 By Leninism, Lukács meant a return to the ideals of
1917 with its program of Soviet democracy.
However, there was uncertainty in Lukács about how to achieve this. He
doubted that the ruling bureaucracies in either the USSR or Eastern Europe
could function as agents of reform: “I have never yet seen a reform carried
out by bureaucrats. . . . I do not think there can be a bureaucratic change and,
what is more, I do not really think there is any such intention . . . they want
to maintain the bureaucratic balance we have today.”129 Yet Lukács’s over-
arching perspective meant that he could not find any other agent for reform
except the “good Thermidorians” in the bureaucracy. According to Mészáros:
“Thus in his ‘political testament’ he could only recommend the authorization
of ‘ad hoc organizations,’ for strictly limited periods and for the realization of
pathetically narrow objectives, as a way of instituting socialist democracy.”130
Even this modest program ended up being too much for the Hungarian
party. After his death in 1971, On the Process of Democratization was qui-
etly buried. It was only published in 1988 as the winds of change reached
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Hungary. Now leading members of the party such as Rezső Nyers hastened to
rally around Lukács’s program: “I fully agree with György Lukács, though I
did not accept his views for a long time—and when I have to choose a past, I
am thinking in Lukács’s spirit.”131 Yet it was too late for the Hungarian “good
Thermidorians” to think in “Lukács’s spirit.” The time for reform, if it had
ever truly existed at all, had already passed.
G. ANTONIO GRAMSCI
Out of all the Western Marxists under discussion, Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts
on Stalinism are the most unclear. This is not helped due in part to the “open,”
cryptic, and unfinished nature of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. This left
Gramsci’s work open to being claimed by those with politics very far from
his.132 However, a patient effort can provide insight into Gramsci’s thoughts
on Stalinism.
Unlike other Western Marxists, Gramsci had a long political relationship
with Trotsky. This went back to 1922, when Gramsci attended the Fourth
Congress of the Comintern, which was devoted to the united front. Yet the
Italian Communist Party (PCI) found itself at odds with this line. Under the
leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the PCI rejected the united front. This had
major consequences in Italy since Bordiga’s sectarianism meant that the
PCI refused to form a united front to stop Mussolini’s seizure of power in
October 1922.
The Comintern wanted a new PCI leadership that would pursue the united
front. Trotsky looked to Gramsci as a potential candidate for leadership. In
the run-up to the congress, Trotsky and Gramsci discussed the dangers of
fascism at length. Trotsky came away impressed with Gramsci’s intelligence
and political acumen. As he said later: “Italian comrades inform me that, with
the sole exception of Gramsci, the Communist Party would not even allow for
the possibility of the fascists’ seizing power.”133
At this point, however, Gramsci agreed with Bordiga on opposing the
united front. At the congress itself, Gramsci and the PCI remained adamant in
their opposition and this caused Trotsky to demand for the Italians to submit
to discipline:
This is the ne plus ultra of disagreement between the P.C.I. and the communist
international anything further would mean open rupture . . . Gramsci is demand-
ing a privilege of intransigence for Italy. On the question of the united front you
made a bloc with France and Spain. The others have now recognised that they
were wrong, but you refuse to do so. . . . You continue to repeat the same error
on every issue.134
Despite the pressure, Gramsci and the Italian delegation refused to renounce
their views, but they did agree to abide by the Comintern’s decisions. This
was largely a verbal concession since Bordiga was in charge, and he con-
tinued to resist applying the united front. However, Gramsci believed in the
importance of disciplined action and considered the PCI duty-bound to accept
all decisions of the Comintern. While Trotsky was correct that Gramsci was
open to a different line, Bordiga’s leadership of the PCI remained uncon-
tested. For Gramsci to successfully challenge Bordiga, he would need to win
over a majority in the party while maintaining unity. This would prove to be
a delicate balancing act to say the least.
This period saw Gramsci collaborate closely with Trotsky. In September
1922, he wrote an essay on Italian futurism that was included in Trotsky’s
Literature and Revolution.135 Gramsci also shared Trotsky’s worries about the
bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union. He wrote to Palmiro Togliatti
in February 1924:
In the recent polemic which has broken out in Russia, it is clear that Trotsky
and the opposition in general, in view of the prolonged absence of Lenin from
the leadership of the party, have been greatly preoccupied about the danger
of a return to the old mentality, which would be damaging to the revolution.
Demanding a greater intervention of proletarian elements in the life of the party
and a diminution of the powers of the bureaucracy, they want basically to ensure
the socialist and proletarian character of the revolution. and to prevent a gradual
transition to that democratic dictatorship—carapace for a developing capital-
ism—which was still the programme of Zinoviev and Co. in November 1917.136
After 1924, Gramsci pulled away from Trotsky for two interrelated rea-
sons. First, he was appointed general secretary of the PCI in August. Now
Gramsci had the responsibility of creating a tightly organized and unified
Communist Party to effectively combat fascism. This meant he had to obey
the decisions of the Communist International. Openly taking sides in the
dispute between Trotsky and the CPSU would only jeopardize Gramsci’s
goals. Second: there was Bordiga. At the Comintern’s Fifth Congress in June
1924, Gramsci supported the new policy of “Bolshevization.” This imposed
the Soviet party model on the various sections of the International. It was
Gramsci’s hope that Bolshevization would weaken Bordiga’s influence inside
the PCI. By 1925, Bordiga was openly defending Trotsky in the PCI and the
Comintern. While Gramsci was aware of the ideological differences between
Trotsky and Bordiga, he saw both as factionalists who threatened party unity:
What has occurred recently inside the Russian party must serve as valuable
experience for us. Trotsky’s attitude, initially, can be compared to comrade
Bordiga’s at present. . . . This shows that opposition—even kept within the
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limits of a formal discipline—on the part of exceptional personalities in the

workers movement can not merely hamper the development of the revolutionary
situation, but can put in danger the very conquests of the revolution.137
When Trotsky accepted the Russian party’s discipline in 1925, Gramsci

hailed this act. He noted Trotsky’s immense abilities, but believed that no one
should be able to put themselves above the party:
as expected, as a seasoned militant, a disciplined soldier of the revolution,

Trotsky has returned to the ranks. Having accepted the judgment of the major-
ity that his political conceptions were mistaken, Trotsky has submitted to party
discipline . . . individuals, no matter how great their value and merits, are always
subordinate to the party, the party is never subordinated to individuals, even if
they are exceptional like Trotsky.138
Gramsci and Trotsky still maintained a political relationship, and they spent
extended periods together in March and April 1925 discussing interna-
tional affairs.
At the PCI’s Lyons Congress in January 1926, Bordiga was decisively
routed. Gramsci had finally secured his position and won his coveted party
unity. He triumphantly told the Italian Central Committee:
The loyalty of all the elements of the party towards the Central Committee must
become not just a purely organizational and disciplinary fact, but a real principle
of revolutionary ethics. It is necessary to infuse in the membership as a whole
so rooted a conviction of this necessity that factional initiatives and, in general,
any attempt to disrupt the cohesion of the party will meet with a spontaneous
and immediate reaction at the base that will stifle them at birth. . . . The party
does not intend to allow any more playing at factionalism and indiscipline. The
party wishes to achieve the maximum degree of collective leadership, and will
not allow any individual—whatever his personal merits—to counterpose him-
self to the party.139
However, Gramsci’s factional struggle with Bordiga was mild compared to

what was occurring inside the CPSU between Stalin and the Joint Opposition
of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Gramsci was worried about discord in
the Soviet Party since he believed it would have disastrous consequences for
both the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Even though the PCI
had agreed not to intervene in the CPSU’s affairs, Gramsci believed that he
must speak up.
In October 1926, Gramsci wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the
CPSU about the struggle against Trotsky. He affirmed the PCI’s overall
support for Stalin: “Now we declare that we consider basically correct the
political line of the majority of the Central Committee of the CPSU.”140

Yet Gramsci condemned Stalin’s methods for imposing party unity, saying
they were bureaucratic and forced. He voiced fears that a split in the CPSU
would reverberate throughout the international and would only benefit the
bourgeoisie.
When it came to the Opposition, Gramsci said that they had greatly assisted
the international class struggle: “Comrades Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev
have contributed powerfully to educating us for the revolution; they have at
times corrected us with great force and severity; they have been among our
masters.”141 Despite this praise, Gramsci said the Opposition was infused with
“social democracy and syndicalism which has hitherto prevented the Western
proletariat from organizing itself as a leading class.”142 He argued this caused
the Opposition to act with a narrow “corporate spirit” that refused to sacrifice
the immediate interests of the proletariat to maintain its alliance with the
peasantry. As a result, Gramsci believed that Trotsky and the Opposition did
not understand the long-term interests of the working class.
After Gramsci finished his letter, he gave instructions for Togliatti to
deliver it to the CPSU Central Committee. However, Togliatti supported
Stalin without any of Gramsci’s reservations. He wrote back to Gramsci that
he privileged party unity and refused to question the CPSU’s leadership: “The
basic defect of the letter lies in its point of departure. The fact of the split that
has taken place in the leading group of the Union’s communist Party is put
in the foreground, and the problem of the correctness or otherwise of the line
being followed by the majority of the Central Committee is only confronted
at a secondary level.”143 Togliatti also accused Gramsci of being overly pes-
simistic about conditions in Russia, saying that he did not really know what
was going on. For Togliatti, unquestioning obedience to the CPSU was the
most prudent course of action.
Gramsci was angered by Togliatti’s reply, believing it was permeated with
a bureaucratic spirit. He replied, clarifying his position by foregrounding the
larger unity of the Communist International over Togliatti’s view that privi-
leged the parochial concerns of the CPSU: “The question of unity, not only
of the Russian party but also of the Leninist nucleus, is therefore a question
of the greatest importance in the international field. It is from the mass point
of view, the most important question in this historical period of intensified
contradictory process towards unity.”144 Gramsci supported unity won by
principled and honest means, believing that unprincipled methods gave only
the surface appearance of unity.
Neither Gramsci nor Togliatti ever questioned the correctness of Stalin’s
program. Their disagreement lay over whether to support Stalin’s bureau-
cratic methods of inner-party struggle or not. While Gramsci’s own struggles
in the PCI had often been rancorous, he had avoided most of the cynicism,
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bureaucratic discipline, and character assassination that characterized Stalin’s

campaign against Trotsky.
Eventually, Togliatti showed Gramsci’s letter to Bukharin, who refused to
present it to the CPSU Central Committee. The Comintern believed that the
situation in the PCI needed to be dealt with. To that end, they dispatched Jules
Humbert-Droz to Italy, where he met with the Party’s Central Committee.
Gramsci was too closely watched by the fascist police to attend this meeting.
In early November 1926, the PCI condemned the Trotskyist Opposition, but
refrained from endorsing Stalin’s methods of struggle.145
How Gramsci would have responded to this decision is a moot point since
he was arrested on November 9. At his trial, the prosecutor stated: “For
twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.”146 Gramsci was to
spend the rest of his life in Mussolini’s jails, where his health and body were
progressively destroyed.
At a prison on the island of Ustica, Gramsci was reunited with Bordiga.
Despite their political disagreements, the two men resumed their friend-
ship and undertook the political education of their fellow inmates. Bordiga
directed the “Scientific section” and Gramsci the “Literature and History sec-
tion.” Bordiga was concerned about Gramsci’s worsening health and wanted
to help his comrade escape. This plan proved abortive when Bordiga was
transferred away.
In the outside world, Togliatti took over leadership of the PCI. After the
Comintern adopted the Third Period line that revolution was around the
corner, Togliatti dutifully followed suit. Party members such as Alfonso
Leonetti, Paolo Ravazzoli, and Pietro Tress who opposed this line were
swiftly expelled. From prison, Gramsci told his brother and party member
Gennaro that he was opposed to both the Third Period and the expulsions.
Gennaro kept that knowledge a secret when he met with Togliatti: “Had I told
a different story . . . not even Nino [Gramsci] would have been saved from
expulsion.”147
In contrast to the PCI, Gramsci advocated a constituent assembly as a tran-
sitional phase, eventually culminating in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Gramsci’s whole strategy from the Lyon Theses to the concept of hegemony
hinged on developing a united front as opposed to the sectarianism of the
Third Period. Even if Gramsci rejected Trotsky’s politics, in his advocacy of
transitional demands and the united front, there was something “Trotskyist”
about his anti-fascist strategy.148
Gramsci’s opposition to the Third Period became an open secret in the
PCI. Once other communist prisoners learned about Gramsci’s position, he
was ostracized. Word of Gramsci’s dissension leaked out to the PCI abroad.
In March 1931, Umberto Terracini wrote to Togliatti about Gramsci: “The
rumor that Antonio radically disagrees with the line of the party is current
and growing stronger in our groups in prison, with repercussions you can
imagine.”149 Togliatti filed away these reports, and Gramsci was only spoken
of as a heroic martyr to the anti-fascist struggle. While Gramsci was honored
by the party and campaigns were waged for his release, his writings were
not reprinted. One party member appealed to Togliatti, demanding him to
“do everything possible to make Antonio better known to the party and the
world.”150
During his imprisonment, Gramsci’s mind remained active even as his
body suffered. In The Prison Notebooks, he wrote thousands of pages about
everything from the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, Dante’s Inferno,
Machiavelli, to the problems of revolution in the West. However, Gramsci’s
works present a bit of a puzzle for any interpreter. He wrote in a cryptic
language to conceal his true meaning from the fascist censors. Moreover,
Gramsci had great difficulty in getting accurate news about the Soviet Union.
Considering the unfinished nature of The Notebooks and his lack of reliable
sources, it is difficult to make any final judgments about Gramsci’s views on
Stalinism during his prison years.
This does not mean it is impossible to decipher Gramsci’s thoughts on
Stalinism. A clue is given in one passage where he describes the Soviet Union
as a totalitarian society. It must be noted that Gramsci’s usage of totalitarian-
ism was not the same as the Cold War counter-Enlightenment. He uses totali-
tarianism in a more neutral way to describe something as “all-embracing or
unifying” where the ruling party is the “bearer of a new culture.”151 According
to Gramsci, totalitarianism in a modern state is when the dominant class ends
the autonomy of subordinate groups, which are then reborn in new forms that
are incorporated into the state’s activity. For him, totalitarianism can have a
progressive or reactionary function depending upon whether it advances or
obstructs the creation of a “new culture.” To clarify Gramsci’s meaning of
totalitarianism, it can be said that a reactionary variety was located in Fascist
Italy and a progressive one was found in the Soviet Union.
Since Gramsci considers Stalinism to be a progressive force, he defends its
methods as historically necessary:
The war of position demands enormous sacrifices by infinite masses of people.

So an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is necessary, and hence a more
“interventionist” government, which will take the offensive more openly against
the oppositionists and organise permanently the “impossibility” of internal
disintegration—with controls of every kind, political, administrative, etc., rein-
forcement of the hegemonic “positions” of the dominant group, etc.152
Gramsci is not unaware of the high price of historical necessity. In a quote

from Marx, Gramsci warns that such methods take a toll on those using
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them: “A resistance too long prolonged in a besieged camp is demoralising in

itself. It implies suffering, fatigue, loss of rest, illness and the continual pres-
ence not of the acute danger which tempers but of the chronic danger which
destroys.”153
Elsewhere in a note dedicated to “black parliamentarism,” Gramsci
reflected on Stalin’s destruction of inner-party democracy. He observed that
in bourgeois democracies, that actual power was exercised outside of parlia-
ment by extra-legal forces known as a “black parliament.” This showed that
democracy would only be formal under the rule of the bourgeoisie, who
held unelected and extra-parliamentary power. In the Soviet Union, which
Gramsci called a “new absolutism,” he said that “black parliamentarism”
played a progressive role: “Theoretically the important thing is to show that
between the old defeated absolutism of the constitutional regimes and the
new absolutism there is an essential difference, which means that it is not
possible to speak of a regression; not only this, but also to show that such
‘black parliamentarism’ is a function of present historical necessities, is ‘a
progress’ in its way, that the return to traditional ‘parliamentarism’ would be
an anti-historical regression, since even where this ‘functions’ publicly, the
effective parliamentarism is the ‘black’ one.”154 Since the Soviet Union has
moved beyond the parliamentarism of liberal democracy, its “black parlia-
mentarism” means the political exclusion of capitalist forces by the dictator-
ship of the proletariat. This socialist “black parliamentarism” was something
Gramsci considered correct and progressive in contrast to capitalism.
Yet his analysis of “black parliamentarism” also discussed its later develop-
ments in the USSR. Gramsci refers to the defeat of the Trotskyist Opposition
as the elimination of the black parliament:
“Black” parliamentarism appears to be a theme which should be developed quite

extensively; it also offers an opportunity to define the political concepts which
constitute the “parliamentary” conception. (Comparisons with other countries,
in this respect, are interesting: for example, is not the liquidation of Leone
Davidovi [Trotsky] an episode of the liquidation “also” of the “black” parlia-
mentarism which existed after the abolition of the “legal” parliament?) Real fact
and legal fact. System of forces in unstable equilibrium which find on the par-
liamentary terrain the “legal” terrain of their “more economic” equilibrium; and
abolition of this legal terrain, because it becomes a source of organisation and
of reawakening of latent and slumbering social forces. Hence this abolition is a
symptom (and prediction) of intensifications of struggles and not vice versa.155
In this case, Gramsci says that Trotsky’s defeat coincided with the end of the
New Economic Policy. He likens the downfall of the Trotskyist Opposition
to removing a thermometer to improve the weather. This does not change the
weather but makes someone more vulnerable to it: “When a struggle can be
resolved legally, it is certainly not dangerous; it becomes so precisely when

the legal equilibrium is recognised to be impossible. (Which does not mean
that by abolishing the barometer one can abolish bad weather.)”156 In other
words, the dissolution of the Trotskyist Opposition ended up hurting the
Soviet Union.
Gramsci’s notes on bureaucratic centralism can be read in part as a coded
criticism of Stalinist organizational patterns. According to Gramsci: “When
the party is progressive it functions ‘democratically’ (democratic centralism);
when the party is regressive it functions ‘bureaucratically’ (bureaucratic cen-
tralism). The party in this second case is a simple, unthinking executor.”157
Gramsci argues that a progressive party such as a Communist Party must be
democratic and involve the active participation of its members. This must
be done even in difficult times when “this provokes an appearance of break
up and tumult.”158 However, regressive parties do the contrary by acting
bureaucratically and imposing unity upon their members. Gramsci claims that
this is both damaging and artificial. He says that genuine party democracy
resembles the commotion of an orchestra setup: “An orchestra in rehearsal,
each instrument playing for itself, gives the impression of the most dreadful
cacophony. And yet these rehearsals are necessary for the orchestra to live as
a single ‘instrument.’” 159
While Stalinism is only indirectly criticized, Stalin himself is rarely men-
tioned by name in The Notebooks. In one substantive remark, Gramsci does
talk about Stalin, saying that he was a practical politician who understood
Russian reality and the Bolshevik theory of hegemony. However, Gramsci
says that Trotsky was an abstract internationalist who lacked Stalin’s sense
of realism:
To be sure, the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of

departure is “national”-and it is from this point of departure that one must begin.
Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise. Consequently, it is
necessary to study accurately the combination of national forces which the inter-
national class [the proletariat] will have to lead and develop, in accordance with
the international perspective and directives [i.e. those of the Comintern]. The
leading class is in fact only such if it accurately interprets this combination—of
which it is itself a component and precisely as such is able to give the movement
a certain direction, within certain perspectives. It is on this point, in my opinion,
that the fundamental disagreement between Leo Davidovitch [Trotsky] and
Vissarionovitch [Stalin] as interpreter of the majority movement [Bolshevism]
really hinges. The accusations of nationalism are inept if they refer to the
nucleus of the question. If one studies the majoritarians’ [Bolsheviks’] struggle
from 1902 up to 1917, one can see that its originality consisted in purging
internationalism of every vague and purely ideological (in a pejorative sense)
element, to give it a realistic political content. A class that is international in
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character has in as much as it guides social strata which are narrowly national
(intellectuals), and indeed frequently even less than national: particularistic and
municipalistic (the peasants)—to “nationalize” itself in a certain sense.160
In contrast to Stalin, Trotsky himself is mentioned quite frequently in The

Notebooks. From the moment he was able to get books delivered to him,
Gramsci asked for works by Trotsky. He managed to obtain a copy of
Trotsky’s autobiography My Life, where he denounced Trotsky’s egoism: “A
great historian, a great revolutionary, but he is an egotist, he sees himself at
the centre of all events, he has no sense of the Party.”161
Overall, Gramsci’s discussion of Trotsky in The Notebooks closely resem-
bles Stalinist caricatures as opposed to any honest engagement. When it came
to the theory of permanent revolution, Gramsci completely mischaracterizes
it as advocating simultaneous revolution everywhere:
1. in the ‌‌first phase, nobody believed that they ought to make a start-that is
to say, they believed that by making a start they would find themselves
isolated; they waited for everybody to move together, and nobody in the
meantime moved or organised the movement;
2. the second phase is perhaps worse, because what is being awaited is an
anachronistic and anti-natural form of “Napoleonism” (since not all his-
torical phases repeat themselves in the same form).162
In other pa‌‌ssages, Gramsci said that Trotsky’s permanent revolution was

a form of spontaneism akin to the syndicalist and Luxemburgist idea of a
general strike.
At one point, Gramsci describes Trotsky’s position on the united front as
the opposite of what he actually advocated. In Comintern debates, Gramsci
says that Trotsky was a theorist of “frontal attack” when “it only leads to
defeats.”163 In contrast to Trotsky’s “war of maneuver,” Gramsci said that
Lenin recognized the necessity for a different strategy in the West: “Ilitch
understood that a change was necessary from the war of manoeuvre applied
victoriously in the East in 1917 to a war of position which was the only form
possible in the West . . . This is what the formula of the ‘United Front seems
to me to mean.’”164 It is true that Lenin did support the united front, but so
did Trotsky. Gramsci seemingly forgot that it was Trotsky who pleaded with
him to support the united front back in 1922! As Perry Anderson observed:
“Gramsci’s confusion was here virtually total.”165
This is not necessarily the final word on Trotsky in Gramsci’s work.
Considering that The Notebooks were coded, it is entirely possible that
Trotsky acts as a stand-in to criticize Stalin’s collectivization campaign
and the Third Period’s “war of maneuver.” This argument is defended by
Emanuele Saccarelli in his work on Trotsky and Gramsci: “This policy, in

turn, was seen as creating the conditions both for a Bonapartist degeneration
and for the demise of the Soviet Union as the propulsive factor in the interna-
tional revolution. This was the real political content of Gramsci’s complaints
against Trotsky, who was used as a sort of convenient shorthand for the ultra-
leftism imposed by Stalin in the third period.”166
Ultimately, Saccarelli’s interpretation of Gramsci on Stalinism is not plau-
sible. Gramsci’s criticisms of Trotsky are consistent with his overall politics
after 1924, where he was a loyal supporter of both the Soviet Union and the
Comintern. However, just because Gramsci was a loyalist did not mean he
was uncritical. He truly deplored Stalinism’s bureaucratic manipulations and
its construction of artificial unity in the Communist Party. It is impossible to
determine what Gramsci’s final verdict on Stalinism would have been. What
can be said is that Gramsci’s analysis of Stalinism, like other subjects covered
in The Prison Notebooks, remained a work in progress.
H. ERIC HOBSBAWM
Like millions of other communists who came of age during the Great
Depression, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm looked to the Soviet Union
as the wave of the future. Until 1956, he accepted Stalinism without ques-
tion. To his dying day, Hobsbawm held on to a nostalgic attachment to the
Soviet Union.
Born in Alexandria in 1917, Hobsbawm’s early childhood was spent in
Vienna. In 1931, the fourteen-year-old Hobsbawm moved to Berlin, where it
was impossible to ignore the economic crash, political polarization, and mass
unemployment. As he wrote in his memoirs: “But the world economic crisis
was like a volcano, generating political eruptions. That is what we could not
escape, because it dominated our skyline, like the occasionally smoking cones
of the real volcanoes which tower over their cities—Vesuvius, Etna, Mont
Pelée. Eruption was in the air we breathed.”167 The Weimar Republic seemed
destined for collapse, and the only question seemed to be what would replace
it: communism or Nazism? The Jewish and left-leaning Hobsbawm naturally
joined the Communist Party. On January 25, 1933, he took part in the KPD’s
last legal march in Berlin. Five days later, Hitler was proclaimed Chancellor.
That formative experience in Germany forever shaped Hobsbawm: “The
months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist.”168
Afterward, Hobsbawm moved to Britain, where he continued his educa-
tion. In 1936, he officially joined the Communist Party of Great Britain
(CPGB). He viewed the recent adoption of the popular front as a welcome
change from the “suicidal idiocy” of the Third Period. Hereafter, the popular
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front became the lodestar of Hobsbawm’s politics: “Politically, having actu-

ally joined a Communist Party in 1936, I belong to the era of anti-fascist
unity and the Popular Front. It continues to determine my strategic thinking
in politics to this day.”169
Later that year, Hobsbawm was in Paris for Bastille Day. This was no ordi-
nary celebration since Léon Blum’s popular front government had just come
to power, so the streets were filled with hundreds of thousands of workers. To
Hobsbawm, this sight was akin to a religious experience: “For young revolu-
tionaries of my generation mass demonstrations were the equivalent of papal
masses for devout Catholics . . . It was one of the rare days when my mind
was on autopilot. I only felt and experienced.”170
Mere days later, the Spanish Civil War erupted and became the defining
moment for his generation: “What Spain meant to liberals and those on the
Left who lived through the 1930s, is now difficult to remember, though for
many of us the survivors, now all past the Biblical life-span, it remains the
only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and compel-
ling as it did in 1936.”171 In fact, many of Hobsbawm’s comrades, such as the
poet John Cornford, volunteered for the International Brigades and gave their
lives in Spain.
As a dedicated communist, Hobsbawm accepted Soviet orthodoxy on
all matters. To understand Marxist philosophy, he eagerly read Stalin’s
Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938). Hobsbawm did not question
the verdicts of the Moscow Trials. He wrote to his cousin that it was neces-
sary for the USSR to root out traitors:
Consider: the following facts are fairly well established: the accused are
people who have, at various times in the past, been in violent disagreement
with the Party Line, have at various times been expelled from the party and
deposed from their positions . . . Second, Trotsky had for the last five years or
more consistently advocated the overthrow of the USSR as a nonsocialist and
anti-revolutionary body . . . Third, the accusations are not intrinsically impos-
sible; that the Trotskyists should wreck seems clear (Kirov) that they should be
willing to cede USSR territory is not impossible: perhaps they wanted in the
end to double-cross Hitler and Japan, perhaps they just thought it a necessary if
regrettable concession.172
While he later considered the purges to be a fit of madness, Hobsbawm

believed that communists had no choice except to stand with Stalin. The
USSR was the only force that could defeat Hitler, and anti-fascists had to just
accept what they were doing: “Consequently, whatever Stalin did, even if you
didn’t like it, even if you hated it, this was a price which had to be paid.”173
Hobsbawm considered World War II not as a struggle between capitalism

and communism, but between Enlightenment and reaction. He saw the Allied
war effort as a people’s war, viewing the Jacobins, levée en masse, and the
Terror as examples for anti-fascists to emulate:
The Terror has been slandered and maligned ever since the fall of Robespierre.
We, who are engaged in total war, can judge it with greater insight. But to get the
true perspective, we must learn to see it, not only through the eyes of fighters for
freedom of 1943, but through those of the common soldiers who, barefoot and
starving, saved their country because it was a good country to save. For them
the Terror was not a nightmare, but the dawn of life.174
After the war, Hobsbawm pursued his academic career and taught his-
tory at Birkbeck College. Inside the CPGB, he was one of the founders of
the Communist Party Historians Group. In its ranks, the Historians Group
included esteemed historians such as Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan,
Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, Raphael Samuel, E. P. Thompson, A. L. Morton,
and Brian Pearce. These historians pioneered Marxist approaches in British
history, the transition to capitalism, class formation, and popular struggles.
According to Hobsbawm, they were largely free from the limitations of
adhering to the party line: “On the whole we did not feel any sense of con-
straint, of certain matters being off-limits, nor did we feel that the Party tried
to interfere with or distort our work as communist historians.”175
As a historian, Hobsbawm produced valuable and lasting scholarship,
but his work internalized a great deal of Stalinist orthodoxy. This becomes
very apparent whenever he wrote on events after 1917. For most of his
career, Hobsbawm deliberately shied away from writing extensively about
the Soviet Union, lest it bring up difficult questions: “I knew that if I had, I
would have had to have written things that would have been difficult for a
communist to say without affecting my political activity and the feelings of
my comrades.”176
His loyalty to the Soviet Union was not severely shaken until 1956.
Hobsbawm found Khrushchev’s words impossible to ignore. Almost over-
night, Stalin was transformed from the paragon of communism into a
despotic mass murderer. In the CPGB, the bulk of the membership were
traumatized at this sudden loss of faith. As he remembered: “For more than
a year, British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a
collective nervous breakdown.”177
Hobsbawm was torn between the two poles of party internal reform and
loyalty to the USSR. He joined with the Historians Group and called for
democratization of the party and an inquiry into its past. This sparked an angry
reaction from General Secretary John Gollan, who compared Hobsbawm to
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Trotsky. However, in the midst of this internal struggle, Hobsbawm publicly

defended the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the pages of The Daily Worker:
First, that the movement against the old Hungarian government and the Russian
occupation was a wide popular movement, however misguided. Second, that
the fault for creating the situation in which the Hungarian Workers’ Party was
isolated from, and partly hated by, the people lay with the policy of the USSR
as well as of the Hungarian Workers’ Party. Third, that the suppression of a
popular movement, however wrong-headed, by a foreign army is at best a tragic
necessity and must be recognised as such. While approving, with a heavy heart,
of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that
we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this
is possible.178
These twin blows of 1956 took their toll on the CPGB and the party ended
up losing more than a quarter of its membership, including most of the
Historians Group.
However, Hobsbawm was not among this exodus, and he stayed in the
party until its final dissolution in 1991. His most fundamental reason for stay-
ing was that there was nowhere else for him to go. One person who encour-
aged Hobsbawm to remain was Isaac Deutscher, who told him: “Whatever
you do, don’t leave the Communist Party. I let myself be expelled in 1932
and have regretted it ever since.”179 A second reason is that Hobsbawm was
repulsed at the thought of finding himself among ex-communists turned
fanatical anti-communists. Third: he was determined to succeed in academia
as both a historian and a communist. Finally: Hobsbawm was emotionally
bound to the Soviet Union and could not easily sever those ties: “For some-
one who joined the movement where I came from and when I did, it was quite
simply more difficult to break with the Party than for those who came later
and from elsewhere.”180 So Hobsbawm stayed in the Communist Party, but
his remaining tenure involved little disciplined political involvement.
The shattering of Stalinist hegemony after 1956 in the West meant that
space was opened on the political left for all sorts of marginalized and
heretical ideas. Hobsbawm welcomed the 1960s with its influx of radicalism.
However, he did not quite understand it since the young radicals spoke a
language he could not grasp. After the failures of his generation, Hobsbawm
had grown pessimistic about the chances of socialist revolution: “We, or at
least congenitally pessimistic middle-aged reds such as myself, already bear-
ing the scars of half a lifetime of disappointment, could not share the almost
cosmic optimism of the young, as they felt themselves to be ‘caught in that
maelstrom of international rebellion.’”181
After 1956, Hobsbawm considered himself a spiritual member of the

Italian Communist Party. He viewed the large Italian party to be more intel-
lectually open than the small CPGB: “Unlike in Britain, in Italy it was still
worth joining the Party after 1956.”182 Another attraction of the PCI was
that it was founded by Antonio Gramsci, whom Hobsbawm considered one
of the greatest Marxists of the twentieth century. However, the Gramsci
he embraced was not a Leninist, but the patron saint of social democratic
Eurocommunism promoted by the PCI.
After Prague Spring, Hobsbawm became one of the advocates for
Eurocommunism inside the CPGB and pushed for greater independence
from the Soviet Union. In 1978, he delivered a lecture “The Forward March
of Labour Halted?” that represented a Eurocommunist challenge to key ele-
ments of the party’s Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. He argued that changes in
the working class meant it could no longer play the leading role in a social-
ist revolution. Instead, the party should support new social movements and
incorporate them into a renewed popular front. As he said: “I argued that the
apparently irresistible though not continuous rise of the British labour move-
ment in the first half of the century seemed to have come to a halt. It could not
now necessarily be expected to realize the historic destiny once predicted for
it, if only because the modern economy had changed, relatively diminished
and divided the industrial proletariat.”183
Hobsbawm’s lecture was directed just as much to the Labour Party,
whom he hoped to rescue from the “sectarians” of the Militant Tendency.
During the 1980s, he supported Neil Kinnock as leader of the Labour Party.
After Kinnock took over its leadership, he proceeded to purge the Militant
Tendency. Hobsbawm cheered this event for ensuring that the party’s “future
was safe.”184 Later, Hobsbawm abhorred the rise of Tony Blair’s Third Way
“New Labour,” even though he had laid the ideological foundation for it by
cheering on the expulsion of the left.
By the late 1980s, Hobsbawm had few hopes left for socialism. He had
never been attracted to Mao and considered the Shining Path to be repulsive.
He supported the Soviet Union more as a counterweight to the United States
than as an inspiring example of socialism. When Gorbachev came to power,
he was excited about the possibilities of fundamental reforms. After the Cold
War ended, Hobsbawm praised Gorbachev for his role: “Like so many in
the West I shall go on thinking of him with unalloyed gratitude and moral
approval.”185
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Hobsbawm said that the whole experi-
ment had failure built into it: “Looking back we can see that the original jus-
tification for the decision to establish socialist power in Russia disappeared
when ‘proletarian revolution’ failed to conquer Germany.”186 However, he
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never quite let go of his youthful hopes in the Soviet Union and communism.
As he told Michael Ignatieff in 1994:
Ignatieff: In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you
had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your
commitment? To being a Communist?
Hobsbawm: . . . Probably not.
Ignatieff: Why?
Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder

and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being
born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. . . . The sacrifices
were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively
great. But I’m looking back at it now and I’m saying that because it turns out
that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it
been, I’m not sure.
Ignatieff: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow
actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been
justified?
Hobsbawm: Yes.187
Deep down, Hobsbawm still believed that if Stalinism had led to commu-
nism, then all crimes of historical necessity would have been justified.
I. LOUIS ALTHUSSER
Committed to the French Communist Party, the philosopher Louis Althusser

accepted the party’s claim to lead the working class. However, he believed
that its embrace of humanism threatened the scientific foundations of
Marxism. Never willing to attack the party openly, Althusser engaged in an
indirect critique. To challenge the party’s ideology, Althusser worked with the
tools at his disposal, most notably Maoism. Yet his role as an internal critic
was fatally compromised because he refused to break party discipline since
he ultimately shared a great deal of the PCF’s Stalinist politics.
When Althusser joined the PCF in 1948, it was the high point of the party’s
influence in France. This was also the era of high Stalinism when Soviet
cultural ideologue Andrei Zhdanov said that the world was divided into the
two camps of capitalism and socialism. The division between the two camps
included everything from biology to literature which all bore different class
characters. Althusser said: “[The PCF] leadership was ‘more royalist than
the king’ or, in other words, than Stalin (who later placed less emphasis on
linguistic definitions) by fiercely and publicly defending the concept of ‘two
sciences,’ bourgeois and proletarian.”188 Like other communist intellectuals,
Althusser was alienated by the suffocating atmosphere inside the party, but
unlike many he stayed.
Since the party’s politics were seemingly impervious to change, Althusser
thought that his only option lay in what he would later call “the class struggle
in theory” or theoretical struggle. However, he admitted to the Italian com-
munist Maria Antonietta Macciocchi that there was a gap between his revo-
lutionary theory and the party’s actions: “there is a contradiction between
what I write and the political situation—between the theory which I seek to
advance and the strategy of the Communist parties.”189 During the 1950s,
Althusser stayed quiet and acquiesced to party discipline.
In 1956, he cautiously greeted Khrushchev’s Secret Speech for loosening
the bonds of intellectual conformity within the French Communist Party.
While he welcomed free inquiry into Marxism, Althusser believed that the
party’s intellectual life was still heavily dogmatic. This Stalinism needed to
be overcome if Marxism was going to advance. In the preface to For Marx,
Althusser defined the tasks that lay ahead: “And also because the end of
Stalinist dogmatism has not completely dissipated them [issues of Stalinism]
as mere circumstantial reflexes; they are still our problems. . . . What the end
of dogmatism has restored to us is the right to assess exactly what we have,
to give both our wealth and our poverty their true names, to think and pose
our problems in the open, and to undertake in rigour a true investigation.”190
Much work still needed to be done to restore Marxist science.
In other areas, Althusser was dismayed at de-Stalinization for opening the
door to right-wing ideas in the communist movement. In place of the inevi-
table struggle between two camps, Khrushchev promoted the line of peaceful
coexistence and the peaceful transition to socialism. French Communists
quickly adopted both positions. This did not mean much of a change for
the PCF, since they had long been pursuing an analogous strategy since the
popular front.
Althusser argued that the Secret Speech was a right-wing critique of Stalin
since it attributed all errors to the “cult of personality” and declared that
socialism was basically sound. This meant that the real problems that led to
Stalinism were superficially wiped away:
Now this pseudo-concept [cult of personality], the circumstances of whose

solemn and dramatic pronouncement are well known, did indeed expose certain
practices: “abuses,” “errors,” and in certain cases “crimes.” But it explained
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nothing of their conditions, of their causes, in short of their internal determina-

tion, and therefore of their forms. Yet since it claimed to explain what in fact
it did not explain, this pseudo-concept could only mislead those whom it was
supposed to instruct. Must we be even more explicit? To reduce the grave events
of thirty years of Soviet and Communist history to this pseudo-explanation by
the “cult” was not and could not have been a simple mistake, an oversight of an
intellectual hostile to the practice of divine worship: it was, as we all know, a
political act of responsible leaders, a certain one-sided way of putting forward
the problems, not of what is vulgarly called “Stalinism,” but of what must, I
think, be called (unless one objects to thinking about it) by the name of a con-
cept: provisionally, the “Stalinian” deviation.191
If the communist movement was to overcome the mistakes of Stalinism,

then a “left-wing” critique of Stalin was needed. In order to arrive at one,
Althusser said it was necessary to look deeper into the contradictions of
socialism itself. As he said later:
I would never have written anything were it not for the Twentieth Congress
and Khrushchev’s critique of Stalinism and the subsequent liberalization. But I
would never have written these books if I had not seen this affair as a bungled
de-Stalinization, a right-wing de-Stalinization which instead of analyses offered
us only incantations; which instead of Marxist concepts had available only the
poverty of bourgeois ideology. My target was therefore clear: these humanist
ravings, these feeble dissertations on liberty, labour or alienation which were
the effects of all this among French party intellectuals. And my aim was equally
clear: to make a start on the first left-wing critique of Stalinism, a critique that
would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev and Stalin but also on
Prague and Lin Piao; that would above all help put some substance back into
the revolutionary project here in the West. . . . For me philosophy is something
of a battlefield.192
Althusser saw other worrying signs in de-Stalinization with its embrace of

theoretical humanism. In the late 1950s, the USSR promoted socialist human-
ism, a return to Hegel, and the ideas of the young Marx. Althusser said that
these concepts served as a convenient way to smuggle social democratic and
revisionist ideas into the communist movement:
Here we see Communists following the Social-Democrats and even religious

thinkers (who used to have an almost guaranteed monopoly in these things) in
the practice of exploiting the works of Marx’s youth in order to draw out of them
an ideology of Man, Liberty, Alienation, Transcendence, etc.—without asking
whether the system of these notions was idealist or materialist, whether this
ideology was petty-bourgeois or proletarian.193
Contrary to the PCF and the USSR, Althusser claimed that humanism could
not provide a viable scientific basis for Marxism. He said that it was the mis-
sion of theoreticians such as himself to offer that scientific basis and return
the party to its proper revolutionary path. His former student Jacques Rancière
said Althusser wanted to use his theory to transform the PCF: “Althusser’s
theoretical and political project . . . is staked on the bet that it is possible to
effect a political transformation inside the Communist Party through a theo-
retical investigation aimed at restoring Marx’s thought.”194
The PCF shifted to Marxist humanism without much protest. Roger
Garaudy made an almost seamless transition from a Stalinist Inquisitor to a
zealous defender of the new humanist faith. Internal life in the party remained
just as tightly controlled as in the Stalin years with dissidents such as
Althusser being closely watched. In 1962, Althusser’s essay “Contradiction
and Overdetermination” with its anti-Hegelian themes was condemned by
Garaudy as “theoretically and politically dangerous.”195 The following year,
Althusser made a self-criticism for his leftism and accepted the PCF’s politi-
cal leadership. However, he did not disavow his ideas and criticized the party
for its theoretical pragmatism. Yet Althusser’s theoretical struggle remained
cautious since he was careful to avoid expulsion: “In fact I never took up a
position where I risked being expelled.”196
The party considered Althusser suspect not only for his anti-humanism,
but due to his pro-Chinese sympathies. By the early 1960s, the socialist
camp unraveled when the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China
formally split. In the bitter exchange of polemics, the Chinese condemned the
Soviets for “revisionism.” Many of these Chinese criticisms echoed those of
Althusser and other leftists inside the PCF.
The PCF’s student wing, Union des étudiants communistes (UEC) con-
tained Maoist sympathizers. Many of them, such as Robert Linhart and
Jacques Rancière, were students of Althusser. In 1966, the PCF cracked down
and expelled at least six hundred from the UEC. The Maoists regrouped and
formed Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes [UJC (ml)]
with Pierre Victor, Dominique Lecourt, Robert Linhart, and Jacques Rancière
among its members. Althusser remained quiet about the expulsions and
stayed inside the PCF.
Like his students, Althusser found the Cultural Revolution with its advo-
cacy of ideological struggle very attractive. In November/December 1966,
he authored an anonymous article for the UJC’s Cahiers Marxistes-Léniniste
praising the Cultural Revolution. Althusser said this was an unprecedented
historical event that every Marxist needed to study closely since it concerned
the future of socialism:
168 C
hapter Five
In socialist countries, after the more or less complete socialist transformation of

the property of the means of production, there is still this question that remains:
what road is to be taken? Is it necessary to go all the way to the end of the social-
ist revolution and gradually pass over into communism? Or, to the contrary, stop
halfway and go backwards toward capitalism? This question is being posed to
us in a particular acute manner.197
Althusser argued that the Cultural Revolution proved that creating a socialist
economic base did not mean a socialist superstructure would naturally follow.
A conscious ideological struggle by the masses was needed to revolutionize
the superstructure and remove bourgeois survivals. Only then could society
continue its march toward socialism: “It is, then, in the ideological sphere that
the crossroads is located. The future depends on the ideological. It is in the
ideological class struggle that the fate (progress or regression) of a socialist
country is played out.”198 If this ideological struggle failed, then there was the
danger of capitalist restoration.
He concluded that the Chinese Revolution offered a genuine “left-wing
critique” of Stalinism. As Althusser wrote in Essays on Self-Criticism:
the only historically existing (left) “critique” of the fundamentals of the

“Stalinian deviation” to be found—and which, moreover, is contemporary
with this very deviation, and thus for the most part precedes the Twentieth
Congress—is a concrete critique, one which exists in the facts, in the struggle,
in the line, in the practices, their principles and their forms, of the Chinese
Revolution. A silent critique, which speaks through its actions, the result of the
political and ideological struggles of the Revolution, from the Long March to
the Cultural Revolution and its results.199
Althusser used these Maoist insights to develop his own criticism of

Stalinism. Unlike Khrushchev, Althusser said that Stalin needed to be upheld:
“Stalin cannot be reduced to the deviation which we have linked to his name;
even less can this be done with the Third International which he came in the
thirties to dominate. He had other historical merits.”200 Among the merits of
Stalin that Althusser recognized was successfully constructing socialism in
one country and defeating Hitler in World War II.
Althusser said that the source of Stalin’s deviations lay in his econo-
mism with its nearly exclusive focus on developing the productive forces.
According to Althusser, economism had a long history since it was the
dominant ideological tendency in the Second International. Under Stalin,
there was a revival of economism in the USSR, which Althusser called “the
posthumous revenge of the Second International.”201 While the Five-Year
Plans did develop industry, they failed to revolutionize the superstructure.
This meant bourgeois ideology was reproduced in the USSR. Stalin failed to
recognize this in 1936 when he declared that class struggle and antagonistic
contradictions had ended in the Soviet Union. In line with Mao, Althusser
claimed that the class struggle continued under socialism and that a reversion
to capitalism was still a danger.
Althusser concluded that Moscow’s response to the Prague Spring was the
“proof” that the Soviet Union was on the road back to capitalism. Initially,
he stayed quiet when the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia since the
PCF supported the action. Ironically, his old adversary Roger Garaudy was
expelled from the party for openly opposing the invasion. Four years later,
Althusser broke his silence and stated that “The national mass movement of
the Czech people . . . merits the respect and support of all Communists.”202 In
the 1970s, he became even more outspoken about the survivals of Stalinism
in the Soviet Union. In his introduction to Dominique Lecourt’s Proletarian
Science? The Case of Lysenko, Althusser said: “the repressive system of the
Stalin period, including the camps, remains in existence, as do the basic prac-
tices of that period regarding social, political and cultural life.”203
For all its insights, Althusser’s understanding of the USSR was too indul-
gent of Maoism. By rejecting economism, Althusser ended up downplaying
the role of economic factors altogether. Like the Red Guards, he argued that
the ultimate criteria for determining whether a society is socialist or capitalist
depends upon whether or not it followed the correct political line as opposed
to the nature of its economic base. This meant Althusser’s whole understand-
ing of Stalinism had a decidedly voluntarist and idealist bent.
Yet Althusser remained unwilling to express any criticism of the French
Communist Party. While his students said that the “capitalist roaders” were
located inside the Communist Party, Althusser remained a member. In his
response to the 1968 protests, Althusser showed that he remained trapped
within the ideological confines of the PCF. In May, student protests set off
a general strike of more than ten million workers that posed a revolutionary
challenge to the French bourgeoisie. Instead of acting as a proletarian van-
guard, the PCF stood on the far right of the movement as guardians of order
and respectability. According to David Caute: “The [French] Communist
Party was profoundly Gaullist, devoted to ‘order,’ to authority, to transmit-
ting commands from above, to the cult of personality, to channeling popular
aspirations into tidy ‘agreements.’”204 In the end, the PCF used their immense
power to defuse the general strike.
Althusser was hospitalized for the duration of the protests, so he did not
participate. It was only in 1969 that he offered an analysis of the May events
in a lengthy letter to Macciocchi. Althusser appeared to offer a more positive
assessment of the student movement than the PCF, since he ranked it along-
side the Resistance. He noted that the PCF had lost contact with the students
170 C
hapter Five
due to the Algerian War and Maoist agitators, but was unable to explain why
this happened, merely saying “we must get to the bottom of things.”205
Althusser found it “too simplistic” to say that the Communist Party betrayed
the students.206 Instead, he claimed that the protests had failed because the
student movement was unable to fuse with the working-class movement.
Althusser painted a portrait of two opposed groups who could not meet. On
the one side was the working class who were motivated by bread-and-butter
issues. On the other side were the petty-bourgeois students, who were driven
by anarchism, Maoism, and Trotskyism. Somehow, the encounter between
them did not occur. Althusser passes over in silence how the PCF kept the two
groups apart. Ironically, Althusser says that it is the task of the Communists
to bring about this fusion. Rancière concluded that Althusser’s absolution of
the PCF showed that he represented a “philosophy of order.”207
Despite his defense of the PCF, Althusser remained uneasy inside it. When
the party abandoned “the dictatorship of the proletariat” at its Twenty-Second
Congress in 1976, he warned that it would reappear like a hydra whenever
“we come to speak of the state and socialism.”208 However, Althusser did not
disavow this new line since it would allow the party to build a new popular
front. These hopes seemed close to realization in 1978 when the Common
Program, a platform uniting the Socialists and Communists, seemed all but
certain to win a legislative majority. At the last minute, the PCF broke the alli-
ance and party militants were left demoralized. In the acrimonious fallout, the
Socialists won more votes than the Communists for the first time in decades.
The PCF denied any responsibility for the disaster.
In response, Althusser wrote “What Must Change in the Party,” where he
blamed the debacle on the party’s residual Stalinism. In a slight overstatement,
Perry Anderson called this article “the most violent oppositional charter ever
published within a party in the post-war history of Western Communism.”209
Indeed, Althusser offered a fierce and powerful challenge to the PCF. He
stated that the party strangled all discussion within its ranks by maintaining a
top-down structure to ensure passivity and the unquestioned authority of the
leadership. Althusser said that the party’s apparatus was nothing more than a
“machine for dominating.”210
He denounced the PCF for abandoning the democratic promises of the
Twenty-Second Congress by showing its true Stalinist face:
The leadership may imagine that the Twenty-Second Congress was a Fountain
of Youth that washed away the bad memories of the past. But people have a
long memory, and blackmailing talk about anti-communism no longer cuts any
ice at all! . . . It is all very well to be heir to the October Revolution, and to
preserve the memory of Stalingrad. But what of the massacre and deportation
of recalcitrant peasants baptized as kulaks? What of the crushing of the middle
classes, the Gulag Archipelago, the repression that still goes on twenty-five
years after Stalin’s death? When the only guarantees offered are words that are
immediately contradicted in the only possible field of verification, namely the
internal practices of the Party, then it is clear that the “buffer” also lies within
the Party itself.211
As proof of the PCF’s Stalinism, Althusser pointed to its long history, where
the party had persecuted, slandered, and broke anyone who got in its way:
There were real “Moscow trials” right here in France. The death sentences were
missing, but you can also make a man die of dishonour, by torturing him with
the charge of being a “police-agent,” “crook” or “traitor”; by forcing all his old
comrades-in-arms to condemn, shun and calumniate him, renouncing their own
past. That happened in France, between 1948 and 1965.212
While it may have been a decade too late, Althusser finally condemned the
PCF for its role in betraying the students in 1968. Now, he called upon the
party to leave its Stalinist fortress and enter a new era.
This was the most open criticism that Althusser ever directed against the
PCF. His points cut deep and spoke long-buried truths. However, Althusser’s
critique offered no strategy beyond returning to the spirit of the 1936 popular
front.213 He even praised Maurice Thorez, the longtime Stalinist general sec-
retary of the PCF. Despite everything, Althusser still could not break with the
sacred cows of Stalinism.
In the end, the PCF weathered the storm and kept its apparatus intact.
Althusser threw up his arms and stayed in the party because he had no other
place to go:
the fact of having joined the Party—in 1948—is not a biographical accident
for me: it was the absolute precondition for being able to be a political activist.
. . . The fact of being in the Party has given my philosophical writings a political
significance. If I left it, that would be finished.214
Althusser’s active political life ended two years later in a horrific tragedy,
when under the influence of mental illness, he strangled to death his wife,
Hélène. After spending time in an asylum, Althusser lived quietly in seclusion
until his death in 1990.
If Louis Althusser was a Stalinist, then not every Stalinist was Louis
Althusser. His writings on Marxist science were far more interesting than the
Stalinist hacks who criticized him. Yet his theoretical struggle failed since
Althusser indulged Maoist voluntarism far too much while his own loyalty to
the PCF apparatus destroyed his political integrity.
172 C
hapter Five
J. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
During Jean-Paul Sartre’s lifetime, the French left was dominated by the
weight of the Communist Party. At times attracted to and repelled by the
party, Sartre could not escape the long shadow cast by Stalinism on political
life. More than any other Western Marxist, Sartre made the most comprehen-
sive effort to understand Stalinism in his unfinished Critique of Dialectical
Reason. In the end, Sartre’s project failed, and he concluded that the demands
of historical necessity inexorably led to Stalinism.
At the young age of twelve, Sartre expressed sympathy for the Russian
Revolution in an act of rebellion against his bourgeois stepfather. This fore-
shadowed a lifetime as a supporter of revolution. In the 1920s, while attend-
ing the École normale supérieure, Sartre first encountered members of the
PCF. This was during the party’s most revolutionary days, when it actively
supported Abd el-Krim, a Moroccan leader in the Rif War and welcomed the
defeat of French imperialism.
While Sartre never considered joining the PCF, his close friend Paul Nizan
did. He was impressed with Nizan’s commitment to Marxism, describing it as
all-embracing: “Nizan made Marxism into his second nature, or, if you prefer,
his Reason. . . . He placed everything within Marxism: physical and meta-
physical, the passion both to act and to reclaim his acts, his cynicism and his
eschatological dreams. Man was his future.”215 Nizan did not share Sartre’s
existentialist philosophy, viewed it as too individualistic and “entirely uncon-
cerned with moral problems.”216 In 1938, Nizan wrote Le Cheval de Troie
[The Trojan Horse] where one of the characters who became a fascist was
based upon Sartre. According to Beauvoir, Nizan denied that this character
was modeled on Sartre: “Nizan declared, nonchalantly but firmly, that his
actual model had been Brice Parain. Sartre said cheerfully that he didn’t
believe a word of it.”217
In 1929, Sartre had grown skeptical about the Russian Revolution, view-
ing it as a “technological culture.”218 He did follow Trotsky’s work with
interest though. Beauvoir remembered: “We had the very highest opinion of
Trotsky, and the idea of ‘permanent revolution’ suited our anarchist tenden-
cies far better than that of constructing a socialist regime inside one single
country.”219 Inside Sartre’s circle of friends were many Trotskyists and sym-
pathizers such as Colette Audry, Aimé Patri, and Michel Collinet. However,
Sartre was no more inclined to join the Trotskyists than the PCF. According
to Beauvoir: “But both in the Trotskyite party and the various other dissident
groups we encountered the same ideological dogmatism as we did in the
Communist Party proper; the only difference was that we had no faith in their
effectiveness.”220
Throughout the 1930s, Sartre abstained from active political engagement.

While he viewed himself as a man of the left, he did not even vote for the pop-
ular front in 1936. When the Moscow Trials occurred, Sartre and Beauvoir
were bewildered by the confessions. They went to Nizan to make sense of it
for them: “Even Nizan, who had spent a blissful year in Russia, was deeply
disconcerted. We had a long discussion with him at the Mahieu, and although
ordinarily he was always highly circumspect about expressing his opinions,
he did not conceal the fact that he was worried.”221
Both Sartre and Beauvoir followed the Spanish Civil War with passionate
interest. Many of their friends, such as the anarchist Fernando Gerassi, volun-
teered to fight for the Republic. While Sartre was a dedicated anti-fascist, he
had no intention of getting politically involved. As he told Fernando Gerassi’s
son John: “What could I do in 1936? Fight in Spain, with my eyes? Join the
Communist Party? There were too many nasty factors involved to do that.”222
Instead, he watched events at a distance with pessimistic sympathy. Audry,
who met with leaders of the POUM, excitedly told Sartre and Beauvoir
about the revolution unfolding. After the POUM was suppressed, Sartre was
skeptical about the rationalizations used by the Communists. According to
Beauvoir: “Was it true that the Stalinists had ‘assassinated the Revolution,’
or should we rather believe that it was the Anarchists who played in with
Franco’s rebels?”223
His doubts about the Moscow Trials and Spain aside, Sartre looked to
the Soviet Union as the main bulwark against Nazi Germany. When the
Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, Sartre’s opinion of the USSR cooled decidedly.
Beauvoir believed that the Pact proved that the Trotskyists were right: “This
treaty proved, in the most brutal way, that Colette Audry and the Trotskyites
and every left-wing opposition group were right, after all: that Russia had
become an imperialist power like any other, obstinately pursuing her own
selfish interests. Stalin didn’t give a damn for the proletariat of Europe.”224
For many Communists, the Pact was a shocking betrayal of the anti-fascist
cause. Few felt this more than Nizan. Just weeks before the Pact was signed,
Sartre and Beauvoir met Nizan, who was still optimistic that war would
be averted: “He talked about the war, thought that we would escape it. I
instantly made a mental translation: ‘The Political Bureau is very optimistic,
its spokesman declares that the negotiations with the USSR are going to be
successful: By fall, he says, the Nazis will be on their knees.’”225 This was the
last time Sartre saw Nizan. Once the war began, Nizan resigned from the PCF
in disgust. He enlisted in the French Army and died a year later at Dunkirk.
In response to Nizan’s resignation, the Communist Party did everything
possible to destroy his reputation. He was called a liar and a police spy.
His work was buried and forgotten. Even after the war, these slanders
were repeated by Communist intellectuals such as Louis Aragon and Henri
174 C
hapter Five
Lefebvre. Sartre never forgot how the PCF smeared Nizan. In 1960, the rere-
lease of Nizan’s novel Aden, Arabie gave Sartre the opportunity to rehabili-
tate his friend: “He issued a call to arms, to hatred. Class against class. With
a patient and mortal enemy there can be no compromise: kill or be killed,
there is nothing in between. . . . I considered him the perfect communist.”226
For Sartre, the nonrevolutionary PCF would never measure up to the standard
set by Nizan.
During the war, Sartre was drafted into the army, but did very little
actual fighting. After the fall of France, he was captured by the Germans
but was eventually released. In early 1941, Sartre formed an underground
resistance group Socialisme et Liberté, composed largely of students and
teachers. In addition to Sartre and Beauvoir, the organization counted
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, and
Jean Kanapa among its members. Socialisme et Liberté also maintained con-
tacts with Trotskyists such as Raymond Marrot, Louis Rigaudias, and David
Rousset. Sartre even reached out to the Communists—who were still not
actively resisting—but they were not interested. The PCF viewed Socialisme
et Liberté as a potential threat and wondered if Sartre was a spy. Considering
the group’s small size (fifty members) and eclectic politics, the members of
Socialisme et Liberté spent more time writing pamphlets than engaged in
active resistance.227 However, the German invasion of the USSR changed
the landscape of the resistance overnight. The Communist Party threw itself
into the armed struggle and quickly became the dominant force in the French
Resistance. Socialisme et Liberté was completely overshadowed and dis-
banded by the autumn. For the remainder of the war, Sartre did not participate
in another Resistance group or fight with the armed Maquis.
As the war continued, Sartre grew to appreciate the brave and dedicated
resistance fighters in the Communist Party. However, he noted the PCF did
not use its immense prestige to work toward the revolutionary seizure of
power. When France was liberated in 1944, the Communists obeyed Stalin’s
orders and surrendered their arms to de Gaulle. As Sartre later concluded:
“When a so-called revolutionary party with five million armed members or
followers refuses to seize power, it can no longer claim to be revolutionary.
By 1947, every Frenchman knew that the CP had become a traditional party
in a bourgeois state, reformist perhaps, revolutionary certainly not.”228
After the Liberation, Sartre founded Les Temps Modernes, which quickly
became one of the foremost political and intellectual journals in France.
Among its editorial board were some of France’s most distinguished minds
such as Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Albert Ollivier, and
Jean Paulhan. While Les Temps Modernes was firmly on the left and rejected
anti-communism, the journal itself was independent of the Communists.
While the party allowed no dissident voices, Sartre made sure that Les Temps
Modernes welcomed contributors from the anti-Stalinist left such as Claude

Lefort and Victor Serge.229
As the preeminent philosopher of existentialism, Sartre was an intellectual
celebrity. That made him into one of the principal targets of the Communists.
In 1946, Henri Lefebvre devoted a book to attacking existentialism. Even
the Soviet Union viewed Sartre as a formidable adversary. Leningrad party
chief Andrei Zhdanov gave a speech where he attacked Sartre and Les Temps
Modernes by name as “pimps and depraved criminals” who “are still capable
of poisoning the consciousness of the masses.”230
Sartre’s existentialism did offer a challenge to the PCF and Marxism.
However, this was not their only point of contention. Sartre also criticized
the party from the left. He questioned its subordination to Moscow, reformist
domestic role, and its tacit support for the colonial war in Indochina.231
Despite these Communist attacks on him, Sartre extended an open hand.
He believed it was necessary to collaborate with the Communists since they
commanded the bulk of the working class:
Unhappily, these men, to whom we must speak, are separated from us by an iron
curtain in our own country; they will not hear a word that we shall say to them.
The majority of the proletariat, straight-jacketed by a single party, encircled by a
propaganda which isolates it, forms a closed society without doors or windows.
There is only one way of access, a very narrow one, the Communist Party.232
Yet Sartre did not believe that the Communists were interested in honest
dialogue. He said that anyone who did not unquestionably support them was
considered an enemy:
And generally it is enough to skim through a piece of Communist writing to

pick out at random a hundred conservative procedures: persuasion by repeti-
tion, by intimidation, by veiled threats, by forceful and scornful assertion, by
cryptic allusions to demonstrations that are not forthcoming, by exhibiting so
complete and superb a conviction that, from the very start, it places itself above
all debate, casts its spell, and ends by becoming contagious; the opponent is
never answered; he is discredited; he belongs to the police, to the Intelligence
Service; he’s a fascist. As for proofs, they are never given, because they are ter-
rible and implicate too many people. If you insist upon knowing them, you are
told to stop right there and to take someone’s word for the accusation. “Don’t
force us to bring them out; you’ll be sorry if you do.” In short, the Communist
intellectual adopts the attitude of the staff which condemned Dreyfuss [sic] on
secret evidence. . . . For the Stalinist a Trotskyist is an incarnation of evil, like
the Jew for Maurras. Everything that comes from him is necessarily bad.233
176 C
hapter Five
Relations between Sartre and the Communists deteriorated further as the

divisions in the Cold War hardened. In 1947, the PCF was driven out of the
French government due to American pressure. Sartre did not believe in sup-
porting either the United States or the Soviet Union. Instead, Sartre, Rousset,
and other members of the non-Stalinist left formed the Rassemblement
démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR) as a “third force” independent of the
two blocs. As Sartre said in December 1948: “To refuse to choose between
the USSR and the US does not mean yielding first to the one, then to the
other, letting ourselves be tossed about between them. It means making a
positive choice: that of Europe, socialism and ourselves.”234
Despite its early promise, the RDR rapidly fell apart. The organization
lacked a clear program, and its members ranged from reformists to revolu-
tionaries. The RDR remained small and never attracted much support from
the working class, who remained loyal to the Communists. When the RDR
moved in a pro-American direction, Sartre resigned in protest in October
1949. As he told John Gerassi later, the RDR was a “colossal mistake.”235
Ultimately, there was no political space in France for a third force. The Cold
War demanded that one take sides.
The battle lines of the Cold War were on full display during the Kravchenko
trial. This centered around Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet defector, whose book
I Choose Freedom (1947) detailed the gulag system and sold a million copies
in France. Beauvoir read Kravchenko and described the book as “gripping”
and suggested that Les Temps Modernes publish excerpts.236 However, the
PCF said I Choose Freedom was a forgery. In response, Kravchenko took the
party to trial for libel in 1949. This event was a sensation and later dubbed as
the “trial of the century.” Soviet officials were flown into France to denounce
Kravchenko, while former gulag inmates defended his account. Kravchenko
ended up winning, but the amount of money he received was reduced to a
pittance on appeal. To all concerned, the trial was considered a moral victory
for the Communists.
Inspired by Kravchenko, Sartre’s former RDR comrade Rousset published
an appeal condemning Soviet gulags in the right-wing paper Le Figaro.
While Les Temps Modernes had denounced the camps in its pages, Sartre
believed Rousset had gone too far by reaching out to anti-communists as
allies. In January 1950, Les Temps Modernes published “The USSR and the
camps” by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in response to the controversy. While
the article was primarily written by Merleau-Ponty, Sartre approved every
single word. They began by acknowledging the truth about the existence of
concentration camps in the Soviet Union:
What we are saying is that there is no socialism when one out of every twenty
citizens is in a camp. It is no good answering here that every revolution has its
traitors, or that insurrection does not bring an end to class struggle, or that the
USSR could not defend itself against the enemy within, or that Russia could not
begin industrializing without violence. . . . If there are ten million concentra-
tion camp inmates—while at the other end of the Soviet hierarchy salaries and
standard of living are fifteen to twenty times higher than those of free work-
ers—then quantity changes into quality. The whole system swerves and changes
meaning; and in spite of nationalization of the means of production, and even
though private exploitation of man by man and unemployment are impossible
in the U.S.S.R., we wonder what reasons we still have to speak of socialism in
relation to it.237
While they recognized that Rousset was telling the truth about the gulag,
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty refused to take his side. He had chosen to publish
in the right-wing press, which hypocritically ignored similar camps in Greece
and Spain.
Furthermore, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty did not agree with Rousset’s argu-
ment that the gulag proved an identity between fascism and communism:
If we conclude from this that communism is fascism, we fully gratify, after the
event, the wish of fascism, which has always been to hide the crisis of capitalism
and the humane inspiration of Marxism. No Nazi was ever burdened with ideas
such as the recognition of man by man, internationalism, classless society. It is
true that these ideas find only an unfaithful bearer in today’s communism, and
that they act more as its decor than its motive force. The fact remains that they
are still part of it.238
They concluded that the Soviet Union, despite its deformities, remained on
the side of the working class: “Whatever the nature of the present Soviet soci-
ety may be, the U.S.S.R. is on the whole situated, in the balance of powers, on
the side of those who are struggling against the forms of exploitation known
to us.”239 To side against the socialist camp was to side with the bourgeoisie.
A few months later, the outbreak of the Korean War brought widespread
fears that France would soon be overrun by the Red Army. Beauvoir recalled
a tense conversation between Sartre and Camus on the subject:
“Have you thought about what will happen to you when the Russians get here?”
[Camus] asked Sartre, and then added with a great deal of emotion: “You
mustn’t stay!” “And do you expect to leave?” asked Sartre. “Oh, I’ll do what
I did during the German occupation.” It was Loustanau-Lacau, always one for
secret societies, who started the idea of “armed and clandestine resistance”; but
we no longer argued freely with Camus. He was too quickly carried away by
anger, or at least by vehemence. Sartre’s only objection was that he would never
accept having to fight the proletariat. “You mustn’t let the proletariat become a
mystique,” Camus answered sharply; and he complained of the French workers’
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indifference to the Soviet labour camps. “They’ve got enough trouble without
worrying about what’s going on in Siberia,” was Sartre’s reply. “All right,” said
Camus, “but all the same, they haven’t exactly earned the Legion of Honor!”
Strange words: Camus, like Sartre, had refused the Legion of Honor, which
their friends in power had wanted to give them in 1945. We felt a great distance
between us. Yet it was with real warmth that he urged Sartre: “You must leave.
If you stay it won’t be only your life they’ll take, but your honor as well. They’ll
cart you off to a camp and you’ll die. Then they’ll say you’re still alive, and
they’ll use your name to preach resignation and submission and treason; and
people will believe them.”240
Events escalated, and Sartre rapidly dropped any remaining pretension to

political neutrality. In December 1951, he supported the PCF’s campaign
against the court-martial of Henri Martin, a sailor who refused to fight in
Indochina. The following month, the American general Matthew Ridgway
arrived in France to assume command of NATO forces, which sparked pro-
tests from the Communist Party. These demonstrations were violently put
down by the police. In the aftermath, PCF leader Jacques Duclos was arrested
and charged with espionage. The only proof offered in court were homing
pigeons that Duclos kept in his garden.
The Ridgway Riots were Sartre’s defining moment in becoming a
Communist Party fellow traveler:
These sordid, childish tricks turned my stomach. There may have been more
ignoble ones, but none more revelatory. An anti-Communist is a rat. I couldn’t
see any way out of that one, and I never will. People may find me very naive,
and for that matter, I had seen other examples of this kind of thing which hadn’t
affected me. But after ten years of ruminating, I had come to the breaking point,
and only needed that one straw. In the language of the Church, this was my con-
version . . . When I precipitously returned to Paris, I had to write or suffocate.
Day and night, I wrote the first part of Les Communists et la Paix.241
Published in July 1952, The Communists and the Peace was Sartre’s most
overtly pro-communist work. Even though he believed it was necessary
to defend the party from anti-communists, he consciously wrote it as a
fellow traveler. Sartre’s main argument centers around the relationship
between the party and the working class. Due to state repression and exploi-
tation at the workplace, workers were kept atomized and at the mercy of
capital. These weaknesses were clearly on display during the Ridgway Riots
when the proletariat was largely absent. Yet Sartre argued that the working
class still had untapped revolutionary potential:
The French worker maintains a rather exceptional intransigence. Perhaps he

doesn’t know what Revolution is: but what can you call this irreconcilable
violence, this contempt for opportunism, this Jacobin tradition, this catastroph-
ism which puts its hope in a violent upheaval rather than in indefinite progres-
sive steps?242
Sartre claimed that the proletariat could only act as a class through a party. In
order for the proletariat to realize its true potential, it needed the Communist
Party. In effect, Sartre said that the Communist Party was the incarnation of
the French proletariat:
That the bourgeoisie should triumph is normal; but I address myself once again
to all those who claim to be Marxists and anti-communists at the same time
and who rejoice today because the working class “is in the process of detaching
itself from the C.P.” I remind them of these words of Marx which they have read,
reread and commented on a hundred times: “The proletariat can act as a class
only by shaping itself into a distinct political party,” and I ask them to come
to their own conclusions: whatever they think of the “Stalinists,” even if they
think the masses are mistaken or deluded, what maintained their cohesion, what
assured the efficacy of their action, if not the C.P. itself? The “proletariat shaped
into a distinct political party”—what is it in France today if not the totality of the
workers organized by the C.P.? If the working class wants to detach itself from
the Party, it has only one means at its disposal: to crumble into dust.243
Not only did the working class represent the future, but only the Communist
Party could speak and act in its name. This meant communist actions—
whether strikes, demonstrations, or election campaigns—all served the
historical interests of the proletariat. Therefore, it was impossible to support
the working class and oppose the communist party. According to Sartre,
left-wing critics of the PCF such as Lefort and Trotskyists like E. Germain
(pseudonym of Ernest Mandel) found themselves outside both the working
class and history: “You, who are not situated in history, who are lost in your
dreaming lucidity, you emerge from it suddenly and you look at your hero
from without.”244
Furthermore, Sartre defended the PCF’s support for the Soviet Union, since
it represented the future of socialism:
historically the proletariat’s chance, its “example” and the source of “the power
of revolutionary penetration” is the U.S.S.R. Moreover, the Soviet Union is in
itself a historic value to be defended, since it is the first State that without yet
achieving socialism “contains its premises.” For these two reasons, the revolu-
tionary who lives in our epoch, and whose task is to prepare for the Revolution
with the means at hand and in his historical situation, without losing himself in
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the apocalyptic hopes which will ultimately turn him away from action, must
indissolubly associate the Soviet cause with that of the proletariat.245
Almost right away, The Communists and the Peace came under heavy criti-
cism from a host of left-wing critics. Ernest Mandel offered the most sub-
stantive response from the Fourth International. He said Sartre’s polemic
worshipped accomplished facts; since he identified himself with the existing
reality this meant apologetics for Stalinist bureaucrats, blind faith, and oppor-
tunism. This fatalism meant that Sartre “considers that an objective situation
can evolve in only a single direction,” when in fact “there are historical peri-
ods in which an objective situation can evolve in two diametrically opposed
directions.”246 Mandel argued that if a communist party is going to succeed,
then it needs a correct leadership, which in turn requires the active participa-
tion of the working class. None of this existed in Sartre’s conception of party
and class. Ultimately, Mandel said that Sartre made a case for the proletariat
submitting to the counterrevolutionary PCF apparatus.
Merleau-Ponty offered his own response to The Communists and the Peace
in Adventures of the Dialectic with an entire chapter devoted to criticizing
Sartre’s “ultra-bolshevism.” According to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s Marxism
lacked a historical framework or any understanding of the dialectic, which
left the working class without any concrete grounding in material reality:
“The proletariat is suspended above history, it is not caught in the fabric, it
cannot be explained, it is cause of itself, as are all ideas.”247 Since Sartre can-
not comprehend the mediations between the workers and their environment,
he is only left with his existentialist and individualistic theory of subjectivity.
Merleau-Ponty argues that this is just pure voluntarism: “praxis is thus the
vertiginous freedom, the magic power that is ours to act and to make our-
selves whatever we want.”248
Merleau-Ponty says that Sartre’s role as a fellow traveler of the PCF pre-
vented him from criticizing the party or taking action in the world:
Today, as yesterday, commitment is action at a distance, politics by proxy, a way

of putting ourselves right with the world rather than entering it; and, rather than
an art of intervention, it is an art of circumscribing, of preventing, intervention.
There is thus no change in Sartre in relation to himself, and today, in a different
world, he draws new consequences from the same philosophical intuition.249
This was a retreat from Sartre’s earlier position in What is Literature? As

Merleau-Ponty put it: “Yesterday literature was the consciousness of the revo-
lutionary society; today it is the Party which plays this role.”250
Thus, Merleau-Ponty argued that The Communists and the Peace was not
advocating a philosophy of commitment since consciousness is identified
with the party. This meant that fellow travelers like Sartre were left play-
ing inactive roles in history. A true philosophy of commitment would begin
by asking whether proletarian revolution is possible in France today and
undertaking an analysis of the Soviet Union. Merleau-Ponty claimed Sartre
is unable to do this since he believed that consciousness stood above history:
Ultimately it is perhaps the notion of consciousness as a pure power of signify-

ing, as a centrifugal movement without opacity or inertia, which casts history
and the social outside, into the signified, reducing them to a series of instan-
taneous views, subordinating doing to seeing, and finally reducing action to
“demonstration” or “sympathy”—reducing doing to showing or seeing done.251
Sartre never directly replied to Merleau-Ponty’s criticism. However, Beauvoir

(with Sartre’s support) wrote “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,”
where she accused Merleau-Ponty of deliberately misunderstanding Sartre
and misattributing positions to him. For example, a great deal of Beauvoir’s
essay consists of refuting claims that Sartre was an extreme subjectivist:
“Sartre’s philosophy has never been a philosophy of the subject.”252 She argues
that Sartrean existentialism holds that consciousness is partly created by the
world. To make this point, Beauvoir quotes from Being and Nothingness:
“In my world there exist objective meanings which are immediately given to
me as not having been brought to light [mises au jour] by me.”253 Beauvoir
says that Merleau-Ponty willfully ignored the limitations that Sartre placed
on his own theory of freedom, which was not an act of “absolute creation,”
but was limited by the historical situation.254 In other words, Sartre says there
are objective structures that limit individual praxis. Beauvoir’s reply not only
engages with Merleau-Ponty, but argues for the portions of Sartre’s existen-
tialism that are compatible with a larger philosophy of history. This proved to
be a crucial stepping stone to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.
While the PCF did not agree with every single line of The Communists
and the Peace, they recognized that France’s most famous intellectual was
siding with them. This was an incredible gain for the party. The fierce polem-
ics between Sartre and the Communists that characterized the early postwar
years were forgotten. Sartre became a fixture at communist events in France.
In 1954, Sartre made his first visit to the USSR and published a series of
uncritical articles praising Soviet life (and ignoring the gulag). That same
year, Sartre became vice president of the France-USSR Association.
While he gained a new audience, Sartre’s work suffered during his
fellow-traveling years. Among the casualties was the play Dirty Hands
(1948). This was a story about a communist intellectual (Hugo), who is
instructed to assassinate a party leader (Hoederer), whom the party consid-
ered a traitor. Hugo doubts his mission and believes that the party should not
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taint itself by summarily executing someone. Despite these doubts, Hugo

ends up killing Hoederer in a fit of jealous rage after seeing him embrace his
wife, Jessica. Later, the party rehabilitates Hoederer, and he is commemo-
rated as a hero. A major question in Dirty Hands is the tension between purity
and the necessity of dirtying one’s hands for the greater good. As Hoederer
says repeating St. Just: “Well, I have dirty hands. Right up to the elbows. I’ve
plunged them in the filth and blood. But what do you hope? Do you think
you’ll govern innocently?”255
One of Sartre’s inspirations for Dirty Hands was the assassination of
Trotsky. According to Beauvoir: “The subject had been suggested to him
by the assassination of Trotsky. I had known one of Trotsky’s ex-secretaries
in New York; he told me that the murderer, having managed to get himself
hired as Trotsky’s secretary, had lived for a long time by his victim’s side, in
a house fanatically well guarded.”256 The PCF and many critics considered
the play to be anti-communist for its cynical portrayal of communists. In
1952, when Sartre was attending the USSR-sponsored World Peace Congress
in Vienna, Dirty Hands was scheduled to be performed. Sartre preemptively
decided to forbid the performance and said all future productions should only
happen when they were approved by the local Communist Party.257 Sartre
effectively agreed to banning his own work.
Sartre’s fellow traveling ended abruptly in 1956 with the Khrushchev
Report and the Hungarian Revolution. In a series of articles later published
as The Ghost of Stalin, Sartre unambiguously condemned the Soviet invasion.
He pointed out how flimsy the arguments were in defense of the USSR’s
actions. He noted that the Communists said fascists had taken over Budapest,
so it was necessary for Soviet tanks to intervene. He compared these excuses
to the anti-communist worldview of James Burnham, since both believed that
the contented masses were easily manipulated by outside agitators:
Those who come to speak to us, eyes bulging, about the diabolical power of the
fascists, I must compare to Mr. Burnham, the well-known specialist on anticom-
munism. I had quite a laugh reading his books. He showed prosperous workers,
tied to the employers by a community of interests, by a reciprocity of respect; it
was happiness. Then, suddenly, issuing forth from hell, a handful of Communists
appeared, and incited discord everywhere. Nothing more was needed to throw
a happy people into despair. I’ve found these same arguments from Communist
writers: the only difference is that they didn’t make me laugh.258
Sartre was opposed to both the Communist and anti-communist accounts of

the Hungarian Revolution as either a fascist putsch or a popular uprising. He
ended up occupying a “centrist” position that was equidistant from the two:
“Even the Communists admit today that it was not a question of a simple
fascist putsch; only the Trotskyists hold that the entire insurrection had a
progressive character. The truth lies somewhere between these two equally
gratuitous and schematic affirmations. Somewhere, but where?”259 What that
answer was, Sartre did not know.
When it came to the Soviet Union, Sartre’s position was equally muddled.
He appeared to adopt the orthodox Trotskyist position that the ruling bureau-
cracy was not an exploiting class: “It is absurd to pretend that this bureau-
cracy exploits the proletariat and that it is a class, or then words no longer
have meaning.”260 He was fully aware of the immense cost of Stalinism, but
believed the USSR remained socialist despite it:
“Socialism in a single country,” or Stalinism, does not constitute a deviation from

socialism: it is the long way around which is imposed on it by circumstances.
The rhythm and evolution of this defensive construction are not determined by
the consideration alone of Soviet resources and needs but also by the relations
of the U.S.S.R. with the capitalist world, in a word, by circumstances external to
socialization which oblige it constantly to compromise its principles.261
Contrary to C. L. R. James, who said “Sartre is a complete Trotskyite,” the

arguments in The Ghost of Stalin did not align with Trotsky. Rather, Sartre’s
position dovetailed closely with Communists such as Lukács and Hobsbawm,
who defended Stalinism on the grounds of historical necessity.262
Sartre’s assessment of the French Communist Party was not all that differ-
ent from those of its internal reformers, since he believed that the party could
still be salvaged:
Our program is clear: through and beyond a hundred contradictions, internal

struggles, massacres, de-Stalinization is in process; it is the only effective policy
which serves, in the present moment, socialism, peace, the rapprochement of the
workers’ parties: with our resources as intellectuals, read by intellectuals, we
will try to help in the de-Stalinization of the French Party.263
He did not advance a revolutionary program, but merely said that the PCF
should renew its commitment to the popular front: “Only a Popular Front can
save our country.”264
When it came to colonialism, Sartre found himself quite distant from the
PCF. He condemned the party’s moderation on the ongoing Algerian War and
its refusal to lead the workers in militant antiwar actions: “The workers are
disgusted by the Algerian war but they are left without instructions, with-
out marching orders. The C.P. harvests what it has sown: when it needs the
masses, it no longer finds them.”265
Even though Sartre’s response to 1956 was marked by equal parts of bold-
ness, confusion, and trepidation, he had finally stepped out of the PCF’s
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straitjacket. Now that Sartre was no longer bound by Communist dogma-

tism, he felt free to develop his own Marxism. The first fruit of his labors
was Search for a Method (1957), where Sartre proclaimed: “Far from being
exhausted Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy; it has scarcely
begun to develop. It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our time. We can-
not go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which
engendered it.”266 Sartre argued that in both the USSR and France, Marxism
had lost its critical spirit when it was subordinated to the needs of the party. In
contrast to Stalinism, Sartre advocated an open Marxism that would embrace
the freedom of the individual. Furthermore, he wished to revive Marxism as
a critical method and a philosophy of revolutionary action.
These efforts to revitalize Marxism and make history intelligible culmi-
nated in the magisterial two-volume work, Critique of Dialectical Reason
(1960 and 1985).267 In the first volume, Sartre explained that human history
was dominated by the struggle against scarcity: “But to say that our History
is a history of men is equivalent to saying that it is born and developed within
the permanent framework of a field of tension produced by scarcity.”268 He
argued that the struggle of human beings to overcome scarcity led to the
development of the division of labor, the struggle between classes, etc. Sartre
said that this struggle against scarcity meant that other people will always
be viewed as the enemy, since they want to gain control of scarce resources:
“thus man is objectively constituted as non-human, and this non-humanity is
expressed in praxis by the perception of evil as the structure of the Other.”269
Throughout the Critique, Sartre attempted to move beyond his earlier
individualism and explain the historical basis for collective action. To that
end, he makes an important distinction between a series and a group. He says
that a series is composed of people who are gathered together, but with each
of them pursuing their own individual goals without regard for anyone else.
An example of a series would be shoppers at a mall or a line at a bus stop.
While a series is a plurality of solitudes, a group possesses a shared collec-
tive purpose. Examples of a group can be the masses storming the Bastille or
workers on strike.
Sartre says that to overcome scarcity, a series must develop into a fused
group such as a revolutionary party. To stay together, a fused group must
institutionalize itself, even at the cost of its original revolutionary ardor.
Institutionalization reaches its highest form in the state, which rules through
violence and manipulation with the fused group reduced back to seriality
and passivity. This leads Sartre to conclude that the democratic rule of the
working class is impossible: “And the reason why the dictatorship of the
proletariat (as a real exercise of power through the totalisation of the working
class) never occurred is that the very idea is absurd, being a bastard compro-
mise between the active, sovereign group and passive seriality.”270
In the unfinished second volume, Sartre proceeded to deal with “real his-
tory” notably the fate of the Russian Revolution. According to Sartre, Marxism
was designed for the working class of industrial Europe, but found its way
to backward Russia where it was forced to adapt itself to new circumstances.
The Bolshevik Revolution created a division between the successful Soviet
Republic and the impotent Western proletariat: “the proletarian Revolution
in the USSR, instead of being a factor in the liberation and emancipation of
Europe’s working-class masses—as it should have been—was achieved at the
cost of plunging them into relative impotence.”271 This was a situation unfore-
seen by classical Marxism and what emerged “was first and foremost that of
a monstrosity: an underdeveloped country passing without transition from the
feudal order to socialist forms of production and ownership.”272
The Russian Revolution posed a sharp contradiction between the universal
and the particular in Marxism. This came out clearly in the struggle between
Trotsky and Stalin during the 1920s. According to Sartre, Trotsky viewed
Marxism as an “abstract universal” and claimed that the USSR could only
survive by spreading revolution to the capitalist West: “In a single dialectical
movement, the Revolution had to be perpetually intensified by transcending
its own objectives (radicalization) and progressively extended to the entire
universe (universalization).”273 At the other end, Stalin represented a “practi-
cal particularism” since he believed in constructing socialism in one coun-
try: “His task was to adapt directives to the concrete situation and the real
men who would do the work.”274 Sartre said that between universalism and
particularity or Trotsky and Stalin lay a choice: “It was necessary to choose
between disintegration and deviation of the Revolution.”275 In the end, Sartre
sided with Stalin’s detour, arguing that under him the USSR consolidated its
gains and aided the international proletariat:
Stalin himself, despite innumerable acts of treachery, did still help the Chinese,
Spanish, etc. to the extent he believed possible without provoking armed inter-
vention by the West; while Trotsky himself, in exile, entrusted the proletariats of
the entire world with the task of defending the USSR in the event of its coming
under attack, because—despite everything—the foundations of socialism did
exist there.276
However, Sartre claimed that Stalin was an “iron-fisted opportunist” who

would “compromise on everything, in order to preserve that fundamental
basis” of the revolution.277 The threat from abroad meant that the goal of the
revolution was industrialization and collectivization at a rapid pace. The need
to quickly develop the economy meant there was no time to gradually educate
the masses, so Stalin resorted to coercion: “It was through the struggle against
the peasants that the dictatorship was to be radicalized, everywhere and in
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all sectors, as Terror. It was on the basis of that Terror—which necessitated a

consolidated power—that the improvised hierarchy was gradually to become
ossified.”278 Stalin ended up creating a new bureaucratic apparatus that ruled
over the proletariat through terror.
While Sartre sought to exorcise the ghost of Stalin in Critique of Dialectical
Reason, he ended up making the case for Stalinism’s inevitability. The failure
of Sartre’s Marxism can be found in his ahistorical understanding of scarcity
since he believes that humanity is permanently dominated by it. Sartre man-
ages to take the traits of humanity under capitalism and transforms them into
ahistorical absolutes. According to István Mészáros, when Sartre claims that
scarcity can never be overcome, he forgets history itself:
Scarcity must therefore be understood in its appropriate historical context, as

parasitic on human history, and not as the postulated ground and pessimisti-
cally hypostatized causal foundation of history. To say with Sartre that history
is “born and developed within the permanent framework of a field of tension
produced by scarcity” can only absolutize the relative and relativize the abso-
lute. For, in the latter sense, the just quoted Sartrean assertion subordinates to
the hopeless vicissitudes of demonically magnified and likewise interiorized
scarcity the absolute imperative of instituting a viable alternative to the estab-
lished mode of social metabolic reproduction at the present critical juncture of
history. By contrast, in the framework adopted by Sartre, the gloom of insuper-
ably absolutized anti-historical scarcity as the ground of historical intelligibility,
wedded to the earlier quoted perverse reciprocity between “myself and the Other
in me,” is overwhelming.279
Furthermore, Sartre accepts the existentialist and individualist premise that

humanity will always see the “other” as the enemy. This means that Sartre
was pessimistic about the success of any collective group being able to
overthrow capitalism. While he recognizes the need for a fused group, he
appeals to the individual. As Mészáros says, Sartre looks to “the only histori-
cal subject he can appeal to and try to enlist for the fights he is engaged in is
the isolated particular individual.”280 This means Sartre lacks a rational basis
for solidarity and proletarian revolution, leaving him with only moral appeals
to an isolated monad. These existentialist ontological categories mean that
Sartre is forced to conclude that a world of freedom is unlikely to be created.
Ultimately, in the case of Sartre’s Critique, his endeavor to find reason in
history ends up justifying any Stalinist irrationalism as a cosmic inevitability.
Yet Sartre felt that he was still obligated to struggle against injustice. The
Critique was written in the shadow of the Algerian War when Sartre and the
Communists were on opposing sides. The Communists saw themselves as
French communists and defenders of the republican tradition. Originally,
the PCF had even voted in favor of sending French troops into Algiers. For
Sartre, the brutality of the Algerian War showed the hypocrisy of France’s
official humanist and universalist proclamations of liberté, égalité, and fra-
ternité when measured against the reality of colonialism. As Sartre eloquently
said in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth:
First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism.
There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. It was nothing but
an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its
affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. A fine sight they
are too, the believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither executioners
nor victims. Very well then; if you’re not victims when the government which
you’ve voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving
without hesitation or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without a
shadow of doubt, executioners. And if you chose to be victims and to risk being
put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your irons out of
the fire. But you will not be able to pull them out; they’ll have to stay there till
the end. Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening
and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the
slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even
your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your
passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors.281
During the 1960s, Sartre’s attention was largely focused on struggles in the
Third World. He welcomed the Cuban Revolution and traveled to Cuba to
meet Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. After Guevara’s death in 1967, Sartre
hailed him as “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human
being of our age.”282 Sartre was also a dedicated opponent of the Vietnam
War. In 1966, he and Beauvoir joined the Russell Tribunal composed of
Bertrand Russell, Isaac Deutscher, Stokely Carmichael, and others who stated
that the United States was committing war crimes and genocide in Vietnam.
When France erupted into revolt in 1968, Sartre welcomed the movement.
He rebuked those standing against the students, especially the Communist
Party: “In particular, as long as the French Communist Party is the largest
conservative party in France, and as long as it has the confidence of the
workers, it will be impossible to make the free revolution that was missed
in May.”283 Sartre was also a supporter of Prague Spring and denounced
the Warsaw Pact invasion as an act of Soviet imperialism. Reflecting on
Czechoslovakia, he rejected the argument that Stalinism was a historical
necessity: “it is impossible to reach socialism by starting from Stalinism, for
one will never reach anything except something whose instrument has been
Stalinism.”284
In place of Stalinist historical necessity, Sartre embraced an anarchist ethos
of revolt. This was evidenced by his support for the French Maoists. Sartre
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admitted that he knew very little about Maoism or the Cultural Revolution.
What he found attractive in Maoism was its revolutionary voluntarism:
“Violence, spontaneity, morality: for the Maoists these are the three immedi-
ate characteristics of revolutionary action.”285 By 1975, Sartre abandoned any
identification with Marxism, favoring libertarian socialism instead. In the
end, Sartre’s Marxism could not rationally sustain any revolutionary opti-
mism, leaving him with nothing beyond pure faith:
It is impossible to find a rational basis for revolutionary optimism, since what

is is the present reality. And how can we lay the foundations for the future real-
ity? Nothing allows me to do it. I am sure of one thing—that we must make a
radical politics. But I am not sure that it will succeed, and there faith enters in.286
Jean-Paul Sartre spent his life earnestly dealing with questions of political
engagement. He struggled with the relation between freedom and responsibil-
ity, ends and means, and the meaning of Stalinism and socialism. He hoped to
unfreeze Marxism from Stalinism, but he concluded that the goal of human
freedom would end in the Dialectics of Saturn. Ultimately, Sartre had no
choice except to reject the Marxist idea of reason in history.
NOTES
1. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (New York: Verso,

1976), 96.
2. Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1934–1955 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 230. Uncapi-
talized in the original.
3. Quoted in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frank-
furt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann,
1973), 14.
4. Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and
Political Significance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 162.
5. Quoted in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity,
2005), 226.
6. Quoted in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 303–4. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin,
The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge and
Oxford, 1999), 252.
7. Quoted in Wiggershaus 1995, 162.
8. Ibid. Apparently, Adorno’s silence on Soviet politics even carried over into his
dreams. In October 1944, Adorno dreamt he was at a party where Trotsky was pres-
ent, and Adorno wanted to speak to him, but was told that “one should not talk poli-
tics.” Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 31.
9. Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 267.
10. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto,” New
Left Review 65 (September–October 2010): 49.
11. Ibid., 41. Interestingly in 1956, Adorno says he wants to develop a “Leninist
Manifesto,” stating: “Thinking in their [the Russians’] writings is more reified than
in the most advanced bourgeois thought. I have always wanted to rectify that and
develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin, while keeping up
with culture at its most advanced.” Ibid., 59.
12. Max Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe,” in Critical Theory and Society: A
Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1989), 78.
13. See Wiggershaus 1995, 257. In 1946, Horkheimer praised the Soviet Union as
being free of anti-Semitism: “At present the only country where there does not seem
to be any kind of anti-Semitism is Russia. This has a very obvious reason. Not only
has Russia passed laws against anti-Semitism, but it really enforces them; and the
penalties are very severe.” See Max Horkheimer, “Sociological Background of the
Psychoanalytic Approach,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. E. Simmel (New
York: International Universities Press, 1946), 3.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New
York: Verso, 2005), 113.
15. Ibid., 55.
16. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xiv. Enzo
Traverso follows Adorno and Horkheimer (along with Benjamin) in criticizing Marx-
ist orthodoxy on the Enlightenment and embracing romantic anti-capitalism. In his
writing on fascism, Traverso upholds The Dialectic of Enlightenment’s argument that
instrumental reason was responsible for fascism. See Enzo Traverso, Understanding
the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 74–75;
Traverso 2017, 275–76. Drawing as much on Arendt as Adorno, Traverso blamed
modernity for the Holocaust. He also considered communism and Stalinism to be
instrumental reason gone wild. See Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual His-
tory (New York: Verso, 2021), 76–77 and 443–44. Strangely, Traverso wrote the
introduction to a recent rerelease of Lukács’s Destruction of Reason, a work that
defends the Enlightenment against fascist irrationalism. Traverso explicitly rejects
Lukács’s defense of Marxism, the Enlightenment, and progress, arguing instead
for embracing romantic anti-capitalism and the jargon of postmodernity. See Georg
Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (New York: Verso, 2021), lviii.
17. Jay 1973, 259.
18. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000),
242. For Bloch’s changing position on utopia and Bolshevism, see Domenico
Losurdo, “History of the Communist Movement: Failure, Betrayal, or Learning Pro-
cess?” Nature, Society, and Thought 16, no. 1 (January 2003): 46–47.
19. Ernst Bloch, “A Jubilee for Renegades,” New German Critique 4 (Winter
1975): 24.
20. Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London:
New Left Books, 1977), 15.
190 C
hapter Five
21. Bloch 1975, 18.

22. Quoted in Oskar Negt and Zach Zipes, “Bloch, the German Philosopher of the
October Revolution,” New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975): 6.
23. Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (New York: Routledge, 1995), 19. Two other
members of the Frankfurt School, Karl Wittfogel and Henryk Grossman, defended
the trials. Geoghegan argues that it was likely Bloch who made the remark about the
Institute members being swine.
24. Jan Robert Bloch and Caspers Rubin, “How Can We Understand the Bends in
the Upright Gait?” New German Critique 45 (Autumn 1988): 26. Bloch said during
the Stalin years that Marxism had become “nothing more than a connection between
quotations.” See Cat Moir, Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Episte-
mology, Politics (Boston: Brill, 2020), 127. For Bloch’s sympathy for Gomułka, see
Michael Landmann, “Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korčula, 1968,” Telos 25 (1975): 177.
25. Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (New York: Verso, 2018), 163–64.
26. “On Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926,
ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996), 251–52.
27. “To Gerhard Scholem September 16, 1924,” in The Correspondence of Walter
Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1994), 246–51.
28. “To Gerhard Scholem [ca. May 20–25, 1925],” in ibid. 268; “To Gerhard
Scholem January 14, 1926,” in ibid. 288; “To Gerhard Scholem May 29, 1926,” in
ibid., 300.
29. “To Jula Radt December 26, 1926,” in ibid., 310.
30. “Moscow,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1: 1927–
1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999a), 45.
31. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1986), 53.
32. “To Gerhard Scholem April 17, 1931,” in Benjamin 1994, 377.
33. “To Gerhard Scholem July 20, 1931,” in ibid., 381.
34. “To Max Horkheimer October 16, 1935,” in ibid., 508–9.
35. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benja-
min: Selected Writings, 3: 1935–1938, ed. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary
Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 120–22.
36. Although Trotsky’s name was later removed. See “Author as Producer,” in
Benjamin 1999b, 781.
37. “To Gretel Adorno Spring 1932,” in Benjamin 1994, 393.
38. “To Max Horkheimer August 31, 1936,” in ibid., 533.
39. “Diary Entries, 1938,” in Benjamin 2002, 338.
40. Ibid., 340.
41. Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 63–64.
42. “Note on Brecht,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940, ed.

Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003), 159.
43. “To Karl Thieme—March 27, 1938,” in Benjamin 1994, 553.
44. “To Fritz Lieb—July 9, 1937,” in ibid., 542.
45. “On the Concept of History,” in Benjamin 2003, 393.
46. Ibid., 396. [translated differently]. For commentary on Benjamin’s Theses on
the Philosophy of History, see Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s
‘On the Concept of History’ (New York: Verso, 2006) and Doug Enaa Greene, “Ben-
jamin, Blanqui and the Apocalypse,” Red Wedge, September 13, 2016. http://www
.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/benjamin-blanqui-and-the-apocalypse0.
47. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1974), 23–24.
48. Quoted in Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1970), 24. For background on Korsch, see Doug Enaa Greene,” Karl Korsch’s
Philosophical Bolshevism,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. http:
//links.org.au/karl-korsch-philosophical-bolshevism; See also Stephen Parker, Bertolt
Brecht: A Literary Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 254 and Bertolt Brecht, Ber-
tolt Brecht’s Me-ti Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things (New York: Blooms-
bury, 2016), 48. At the beginning of the Cold War, Korsch believed it was necessary
to critically support the Soviet Union against the United States. See “Karl Korsch to
Bertolt Brecht, April 18, 1947,” in Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory, ed. Douglas
Kellner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 289.
49. Quoted in Parker 2014, 262.
50. Bertolt Brecht, “As the Fascists grew ever stronger in Germany . . .” in The
Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, ed. David Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2019), 443–44.
51. Brecht 2016, 143. Brecht uses the following abbreviations: To-tsi = Trotsky,
Ni-en = Stalin, Ka-meh = Marx. He describes Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolu-
tion on ibid. 138–39.
52. Benjamin 1999b, 477. See also Wizisla 2009, 28–30. While living in Califor-
nia in 1942, Brecht read Trotsky’s book on Lenin “with great pleasure.” See Brecht
1996, 273.
53. Parker 2014, 254.
54. Quoted in ibid., 318–19.
55. “Resolution,” in Brecht 2019, 672.
56. Quoted in Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in
Europe and America (New York: Verso, 2006), 403.
57. Bertolt Brecht, “Why are the Petty Bourgeoisie and Even the Proletariat Threat-
ening to Turn to Fascism?” in Brecht on Art and Politics, ed. Tom Kuhn and Steve
Giles (New York: Methuen, 2003), 192. For Comintern orthodoxy on fascism, see
George Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Unity of the Working Class (Paris:
Foreign Languages Press, 2020).
58. Quoted in Brecht 2003, 124. However, Brecht wrote to the Soviet authorities on
behalf of other victims: “Brecht wrote more letters on behalf of other victims of this
‘rough’ Soviet justice. He appealed to the banker Max Warburg and to Jewish help
192 C
hapter Five
groups to come to the rescue of his friend Hermann Borchardt, who had been teaching
history and philosophy in Minsk.” See Parker 2014, 362.
59. Bertolt Brecht, “To Lion Feuchtwanger August 1937,” in Bertolt Brecht Letters
1913–1956, ed. John Willett (New York: Routledge, 1990), 261.
60. “On the Moscow Trials,” in Brecht 2003, 184.
61. See “On My Attitude to the Soviet Union” ibid., 182–83.
62. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York:
Harper & Row, 1987), 492–93.
63. Žižek 2008, 88.
64. “To those born after,” in Brecht 2019, 736.
65. Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 123–24.
66. “Diary Entries,” in Benjamin 2002, 336.
68. Quoted in ibid., 392–93.
69. Quoted in Tucker and Cohen 1965, 657–58.
70. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929–1940 (New York: Verso,
2003c), 300.
72. Ibid., 336.
73. Ibid., 337.
74. “To Bernard von Brentano January 1935,” in Brecht 1990, 194.
75. “The farmer’s address to his ox,” in Brecht 2019, 699. “Diary Entries,” in
Benjamin 2002, 338.
77. Brecht 1996, 34–35. Lowercase in the original.
79. “The Solution,” in Brecht 2019, 1013.
80. “On the Death of Stalin,” in Brecht 2003, 324.
81. “On the Criticism of Stalin,” in ibid., 341. For more about the influence of Mao-
ism on Brecht, see Anthony Squiers, “Contradiction and Coriolanus: A Philosophical
Analysis of Mao Tse Tung’s Influence on Bertolt Brecht,” Philosophy and Literature
37, no. 1 (April 2013): 239–46.
82. Herbert Marcuse, “The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition,” in
The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume III: The New Left and the 1960s,
ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2005), 71.
83. Herbert Marcuse, “Marxism and Revolution in an Era of Counterrevolution,”
in The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume VI: Marxism, Revolution and
Utopia, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (New York: Routledge, 2014), 429.
84. See Herbert Marcuse, “The Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in The
Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Mar-
cuse, ed. Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 72–114.
85. Herbert Marcuse, “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View
of the State,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: MayFly Books,
2009), 30.
86. “Philosophy and critical theory,” in ibid., 105.
87. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
(London: Routledge, 1955), 411. In Nazi-occupied France, the philosopher Jean Hyp-
polite taught an anti-fascist reading of Hegel:
Beginning in 1941, Hyppolite taught the “premiere preparatoire” at the Paris

Lycées Henri IV and Louis-le-Grand. He elaborated his commentary on the
Phenomenology, which was to become Genesis and Structure, in common with
his students in Khagne during the war and the Nazi occupation. His anti-Fascist
readings of Hegel, and statements such as that for Hegel, “insofar as we seek the
Universal, we are all Jews,” marked many of the students.
John Heckman, “Hyppolite and the Hegel Revival in France,” Telos 16 (1973): 135.
88. Marcuse 1955, 437.
89. Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1984), 149. As the Cold War ramped up, Marcuse wrote a
lengthy and detailed report on world communism for the State Department in 1949.
See Herbert Marcuse, “The Potentials of World Communism,” in Secret Reports on
Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, ed. Raffaele
Laudani (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 591–610.
90. Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger, “An Exchange of Letters,” in The Hei-
degger Controversy. A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1993), 164.
91. See “Introduction” in The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume I:
Technology, War and Fascism, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1998), 27.
92. Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia
93. Ibid., 124.
94. Ibid., 174. Even after Brezhnev halted Khrushchev’s reforms, Marcuse contin-
ued to believe that the Soviet system was reformable: “I recognize that the socialist
base of these countries contains the possibility of development toward liberalization
and ultimately toward a free society.” See “Marcuse Defines his New Left Line,” in
Marcuse 2005, 116. However, he condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czecho-
slovakia in 1968, as “one of the most reprehensible acts in the history of Socialism”
Ibid., 104.
95. Marcuse 1958, 41.
96. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society (New York: Routledge, 2002), 23.
97. Ibid., 260. See also Herbert Marcuse, “An Essay on Liberation,” Marxists
Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1969/
essay-liberationhtm and Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics,
and Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 85.
98. Quoted in Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
(New York: Verso, 2016), 346. On Marcuse’s thoughts about being compared to Marx
and Mao, see “Interview with Marcuse,” in Marcuse 2005, 133. For more on Adorno
and students see ibid., 341–48. On Horkheimer and the Vietnam War, see Peter M. R.
194 C
hapter Five
Stirk, Max Horkheimer: A New Introduction (Boston: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992),
179–80.
99. Marcuse 2002, 261. For a lengthy Marxist-Leninist criticism of Marcuse, see
Jack Woddis, New Theories of Revolution: A Commentary on the Views of Frantz
Fanon, Régis Debray and Herbert Marcuse (New York: International Publishers,
1972), 279–394. The analysis of Marcuse in this section draws heavily upon István
Mészáros, The Power of Ideology (New York: Zed Books, 2005), 129–45.
100. For background on Lukács’s activities in Soviet Hungary, see Doug Enaa
Greene, “Lenin’s Boys: A Short History of Soviet Hungary,” Cosmonaut, August
21, 2020. https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/08/21/lenins-boys-a-short-history-of-soviet
-hungary/.
101. V. I. Lenin, “Kommunismus,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1974), 165 (henceforth LCW). See also Georg Lukács, “The
Question of Parliamentarism,” in Tactics and Ethics, 1919–1929: The Questions of
Parliamentarianism and Other Essays (New York: Verso, 2014), 53–63.
102. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialec-
tics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), xiv.
103. Quoted in István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 389.
104. Lukács 1971, xxiii.
105. “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” in Lukács 2014, 188.
106. Ibid., 203. This section draws heavily on Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács: From
Romanticism to Bolshevism (London: New Left Books, 1979), 194–96. See also
Lukács 1971, xxviii.
107. Georg Lukács, Goethe and His Age (London: Merlin Books, 1968), 138–39.
Harrison Fluss says that Žižek also uses a similar method to Lukács in criticizing
Trotsky as a utopian dreamer and justifying the “realism” of Stalinist Thermidorian-
ism. While Žižek praises Lenin and Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism, he is unable to
comprehend the problem of Stalinism or able to understand how the program of the
Left Opposition represented a genuine alternative. See Harrison Fluss, “The Prophet
Avec Lacan,” Historical Materialism. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book
-review/prophet-avec-lacan.
108. Lukács 1968, 137–38.
109. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York: New York Review
Books, 2012), 226.
110. Lukács 1971, xxx. For background see Paul Le Blanc, “Spider and Fly: The
Leninist Philosophy of Georg Lukács,” Historical Materialism 21, no. 2 (2013):
47–75.
111. Lukács 1971, xxviii–xxix.
112. Isaac Deutscher, “György Lukács and ‘Critical Realism,’” in Marxism in Our
Time (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971a), 291.
113. Peter Osborne, ed., A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (New York:
Routledge, 1996), 50. It was not until after Stalin’s death that The Young Hegel was
printed in the Eastern Bloc.
114. Lukács 2021, 5. For a defense of Marxism and the Radical Enlightenment,
see the six-part series by Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss. In particular, see Doug
Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Enlightenment Betrayed: Jonathan Israel, Marx-
ism, and the Enlightenment Legacy,” Left Voice, July 14, 2020. https://www.leftvoice
.org/enlightenment-betrayed-jonathan-israel-marxism-and-the-enlightenment-legacy
/; Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Marx and the Communist Enlightenment,”
Left Voice, August 4, 2020. https://www.leftvoice.org/marx-and-the-communist
-enlightenment/; Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Enlightenment Betrayed,”
Left Voice, August 16, 2020. https://www.leftvoice.org/enlightenment-betrayed/; In
addition, see Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, “Reason is Red: Why Marxism Needs
a Philosophy,” Spectre Journal, August 29, 2022. https://spectrejournal.com/reason
-is-red/.
115. Georg Lukács, Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York:
Verso, 1983), 19. In a polemic with Simone de Beauvoir in 1947, Lukács claimed
that the trials “increased the chances of a Russian victory at Stalingrad.” Quoted in
Löwy 1979, 206.
116. Lukács 1983, 107. In 1967 postscript to Lenin, Lukács compared to Trotsky
to Danton: “Even the great orators of the workers’ revolution, such as Lassalle and
Trotsky, have certain Dantonesque features.” Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study of the
Unity of His Thought (New York: Verso, 2009), 90.
117. Georg Lukács, The Struggle of Humanism and Barbarism (1943). Marxists
Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/Lukács/works/1943/humanism
-barbarism/index.htm.
118. Lukács 1983, 113. See also Georg Lukács, The Culture of People’s Democ-
racy Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition, 1945–1948
(Boston: Brill, 2013).
119. Georg Lukács, “Reflections on the Cult of Stalin,” in Marxism and Human
Liberation, ed. E. San Juan Jr. (New York: Delta Book, 1973), 62. Isaac Deutscher
categorized Palmiro Togliatti as located on the “right” of the International Communist
Movement. See Isaac Deutscher, “Three Currents in Communism,” in Ironies of His-
tory: Essays on Contemporary Communism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971a), 69.
120. Quoted in Mészáros 1995, 508.
121. Löwy 1979, 206.
122. “In the meantime, in Hungary and other countries, events have occurred which
demand a rethinking of certain problems connected with Stalin’s legacy. In the bour-
geois world (and, in some instances, in the socialist countries) this reaction has taken
the form of a revision of the theories of Marx and Lenin. It is no doubt correct to see
in revisionism the main danger facing Marxism-Leninism at present. But we will be
helpless in the face of this danger unless we are prepared to submit Stalin’s own dog-
matism, and that of the Stalinist period, to the most relentless criticism. We must dem-
onstrate the underlying pattern common to both, and the similarity of method. And
we must isolate those elements in both which are contradictory to Marxism-Leninism.
Only on the basis of such criticism, as with Rosa Luxemburg’s complex legacy, can
Stalin’s positive achievements be seen in perspective.” See Georg Lukács, The Mean-
ing of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin Books, 1963), 10.
196 C
hapter Five
123. “Reflections on the Cult of Stalin,” in Lukács 1973, 64.

124. Lukács 1983, 129.
125. Ibid. 130.
126. Ibid. 132–33. While defying his jailers in Romania, Adorno wrote a critical
review of Lukács’s The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. While acknowledging
that “Lukács’s personal integrity is above all suspicion,” Adorno also said in a taste
of irony, “that here is a man who is desperately tugging at his chains.” See Adorno in
Bloch, et. all 1977, 175.
127. Quoted in Mészáros 1995, 412. For his opinions on the student movement.
“The Twin Crises” in Lukács 1973, 321.
128. Georg Lukács, The Process of Democratization (Albany: State University of
New York, 1991), 166.
129. Quoted in Löwy 1979, 211.
130. Mészáros 1995, 414.
131. Quoted in ibid., 283.
132. It is beyond the scope of this work to look at how revisionists and opportun-
ists have misunderstood Gramsci. To learn more about Gramsci’s communist politics,
see Doug Enaa Greene, “Gramsci for Communists,” LINKS International Journal of
Socialist Renewal, June 22, 2015. http://links.org.au/node/4474.
133. Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Path-
finder Press, 1971), 191. See also Frank Rosengarten, The Revolutionary Marxism of
Antonio Gramsci (Boston: Brill, 2014), 25.
134. Quoted in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New
York: International Publishers, 1971), lii.
135. See ibid., lviii and Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–
1929 (New York: Verso, 2003b), 411.
136. Antonio Gramsci, “Gramsci to Togliatti, Terracini and others (9 February
1924),” in Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926) (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1978), 192. When Gramsci was in Vienna with Victor Serge, he voiced
doubts about the flush of new recruits into the Soviet Party. Known as the Lenin
Levy, these were inexperienced workers whom the bureaucracy welcomed into the
Communist Party after Lenin’s death. According to Gramsci: “How much were these
proletarians worth, if they had had to wait for the death of Vladimir Ilyich before
coming to the Party?” See Serge 2012, 219.
137. “Gramsci’s Intervention at the Como Conference,” in Gramsci 1978, 252–53.
138. Rosengarten 2014, 36.
139. “The Party’s First Five Years,” in Gramsci 1978, 387–90.
140. “On the Situation in the Bolshevik Party,” in ibid. 430.
141. Ibid., 432.
142. Ibid.
143. Ibid., 433.
144. Ibid., 437–38.
145. E. H. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926–1929: Volume 3, no. 2‌‌‌‌‌
(New York: Macmillan, 1976), 537.
146. Gramsci 1971, lxxxix.
147. Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (New York: Verso,
1970), 253.
148. See Alistair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: An Intellectual Biography (Boston:
Brill, 2017), 268–69.
149. Paolo Spriano, Antonio Gramsci and the Party: The Prison Years (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), 71.
150. See also ibid., 129, and Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the
Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (New York:
Routledge, 2008), 32.
151. Gramsci 1971, 147 and 265.
152. Ibid., 238–39.
153. Ibid., 239. Gramsci is quoting Marx’s essay The Eastern Question written on
14 September 1855.
154. Ibid., 255.
155. Ibid., 256.
156. Ibid., 256–57. This analysis on “black parliamentarism” follows Saccarelli
closely, see Saccarelli 2008, 81–82. Gramsci was informed of the arrest of Zinoviev
and Kamenev in 1935 but refrained from making any judgment on them. Although
he did note that their confessions should not be taken as proof of guilt. See Spriano
1979, 97–98.
157. Gramsci 1971, 155.
158. Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935
(New York: New York University Press, 2000), 244.
159. Ibid., 245.
160. Gramsci 1971, 240–41.
161. Quoted in Rosengarten 2014, 39.
162. Gramsci 1971, 241.
163. Ibid., 238.
164. Ibid., 237–38.
165. Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (New York: Verso,
2020), 137.
166. Saccarelli 2008, 84. However, Gramsci also condemned Trotsky’s views
on the militarization of labor as a form of “Bonapartism.” See Gramsci 1971, 301.
Gramsci did not accept the accusation that Trotsky was a fascist agent. And the claim
that he called Trotsky “the whore of fascism” was a falsehood created by Togliatti.
See Spriano 1979, 139.
167. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002), 47.
168. Ibid., 56.
169. Ibid., 68 and 218.
170. Ibid., 323.
171. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–
1991 (London: Little, Brown, 1994), 160. In line with the popular front and collective
security, Hobsbawm believed it was necessary to roll back the Spanish Revolution.
See Eric Hobsbawm, “In the Era of Anti-Fascism 1929–45,” in How to Change
198 C
hapter Five
the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2011), 274.
172. Quoted in Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019), 149.
173. Eric Hobsbawm, “Eric Hobsbawm Speaks on His New Memoir,” UCLA.
https://web.international.ucla.edu/asia/article/7315.
174. Quoted in Evans 2019, 225.
175. Maurice Cornforth, ed., Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L.
Morton (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), 30.
176. Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century (London, Little, Brown, 2000), 158–59.
The Age of Extremes is the major exception to this.
177. Hobsbawm 2002, 206.
178. Quoted in Evans 2019, 343. For the Trotsky remark, see ibid. 345–47.
179. Hobsbawm 2002, 202.
180. Ibid., 218.
181. Ibid., 254.
182. Ibid., 353.
183. Ibid. 264; Eric Hobsbawm, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism
Today (September 1978): 279–86. Bryan Palmer says that Hobsbawm’s analysis was
meant to develop a popular front to defeat the onslaught of Thatcherism and neoliber-
alism, but it inevitably failed: “And so the old popular frontist went to the table, shook
the dice in his fist and—dropped a snake eyes.” See Bryan Palmer, “Hobsbawm’s
Politics: The Forward March of the Popular Front Halted,” in Marxism and Histori-
cal Practice: Interventions and Appreciations Volume II (Brill: Boston, 2015), 271.
184. Hobsbawm 2002, 268. Kinnock considered Hobsbawm to be his favorite
Marxist. See Evans 2019, 517.
185. Hobsbawm 2002, 279.
186. Hobsbawm 1994, 379.
187. Eric Hobsbawm, “The Late Show - Eric Hobsbawm - Age of Extremes (24
October 1994),” tw19751, Interview. [accessed November 12, 2021]. https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnd2Pu9NNPw&t=911s.
188. Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (New York: The New
Press, 1993), 196.
189. Quoted in Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Boston: Brill,
2006), 215.
190. Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Verso, 2005), 30. This line from
Althusser was paraphrased in the Godard pro-Maoist film La Chinoise (1967). For
more on that movie, see Doug Enaa Greene and Shalon van Tine, “A Fight on Two
Fronts: On Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise,” Cosmonaut, August 28, 2019. https://
cosmonaut.blog/2019/08/28/a-fight-on-two-fronts-on-jean-luc-godards-la-chinoise/.
191. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976),
80–81.
192. Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists
(New York: Verso, 2012), xviii.
193. Althusser 1996, 76. Losurdo takes issue with Althusser’s anti-humanism and
the whole idea of an epistemological break in Marx:
The continuity in Marx’s development is clear, and what Althusser described as

an epistemological break is simply the transition to a discourse in which moral
condemnation of the reifying processes inherent in bourgeois society, and of its
anti-humanism, is expressed more concisely and elliptically.
See Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History

(New York: Palgrave, 2016a), 82.
194. Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson (New York: Continuum, 2011), 24.
195. Althusser 2005, 169 and Elliott 2006, 19–20.
196. Althusser 1993, 199 and Elliott 2006, 194.
197. Louis Althusser, “Althusser in 1966: Cultural Revolution, Party, State and
Conjuncture,” Kasama Project, April 19, 2010. https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010
/04/19/althusser-on-the-cultural-revolution/; Doug Enaa Greene, “Louis Althusser
and the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” The Blanquist, December 31, 2017. http://
blanquist.blogspot.com/2017/12/louis-althusser-and-chinese-cultural.html.
198. Althusser, “Althusser in 1966.”
199. Althusser 1976, 92. Other radicals such as Macciocchi saw Maoism as a genu-
ine anti-Stalinist movement:
Two other points seem to me essential for the history of the Marxist-Leninist
workers’ movement. The first is that the Chinese have offered concrete and sus-
tained criticism of Stalinist policy and have constantly followed a policy which
is different from, and often in opposition to, the one which Stalin attempted to
impose upon Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Revolution. History has taken it
upon itself to show the serious errors of this Stalinist line. The second point is
that Chinese critique of Stalinism is from the left (a concept which Althusser
elaborates in an as yet unpublished text), whereas all Western criticism, includ-
ing that of certain leftist or Trotskyite groups, is from the right.
See Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Daily Life in Revolutionary China (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1972), 486–87. Italics in the original. See also Rossana Ros-
sanda, “Mao’s Marxism,” Socialist Register 8 (1971): 53–80.
Althusser’s writings also provided inspiration to the work of the Maoist Charles
Bettelheim, who wrote an extensive study of the USSR in the mid-1970s:
La Transition vers l’économie socialiste and Calcul économique et formes de

propriété. These two books also bear the marks of two great social and politi-
cal experiences — the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, which I have followed
closely since 1958 and 1960, respectively — and also of the revival of Marxist
thought in France. This revival has been connected especially with the increas-
ingly widespread influence of Mao Tse-tung’s ideas and has been affected by the
200 C
hapter Five
break made by L. Althusser and his associates with the economistic interpreta-
tion of Marx’s Capital.
See Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR: The First Period 1917–1923
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 48. Althusser himself praised Bettel-
heim’s work in his introduction to Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The
Case of Lysenko (London: New Left Books, 1977), 8. See also Doug Enaa Greene,
“Charles Bettelheim and the Socialist Road,” LINKS International Journal of Social-
ist Renewal, July 7, 2016. http://links.org.au/node/4745.
200. Althusser 1976, 91. See also Elliot 2006, 238–39.
201. Althusser 1976, 90. See also Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capital-
ism (New York: Verso Books, 2014), 215. Some followers of Althusser such as Philip
Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and Derek Sayer argue that it was not just Stalin, but all
Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky who suffered from an “economist” deviation
that advocated developing the productive forces. They claim that only Mao escaped
this Bolshevik problematic. In particular see Philip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and
Derek Sayer, Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory: Bolshevism and Its Critique
(London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1978); Philip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and Derek
Sayer, For Mao: Essays in Historical Materialism (London: MacMillian Press Ltd,
1979).
202. Althusser 1976, 77. In 1976, Althusser declared his support for striking Polish
workers and the Workers Defense Committee in Poland. See Perry Anderson, Argu-
ments Within English Marxism (New York: Verso, 1980), 111.
203. Lecourt 1977, 12. In the late 1970s, Althusser even signed an appealing for
the rehabilitation of Bukharin. See Richard Day, ed., N. I. Bukharin: Selected Writings
on the State and the Transition to Socialism (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1982), xxi.
204. David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1988), 250. For the best book on May 1968, see Daniel Singer,
Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).
205. Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, Letters from inside the Italian Communist
Party to Louis Althusser (London: New Left Books, 1973), 317.
206. Ibid., 309.
207. Rancière 2011, 71. This echoes Edward Thompson’s claim that “In short,
Althusserianism is Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of Theory. It is Stalinism at last,
theorised as ideology.” See Edward P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London:
Merlin Press, 1978), 182.
208. Louis Althusser, “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist
Party,” New Left Review 104 (July–August 1977): 10. See also Louis Althusser, “The
Historic Significance of the 22nd Congress,” in Étienne Balibar, On the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat (London: Verso, 1977), 193–212.
209. Anderson 1980, 113. See also Ernest Mandel’s discussion of Althusser’s
essay: “Mandel on Althusser, Party and Class,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://
www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1982/xx/althusser htm.
210. Louis Althusser, “What Must Change in the Party,” New Left Review 109
(May–June 1978): 26.
211. Ibid., 38.

212. Ibid., 39.
213. Ibid., 28 and 42. Althusser himself was not uncritical of the popular front
experience. See Althusser 2014, 223.
214. Quoted in Elliott 2006, 291.
215. “Paul Nizan,” in Sartre 1965, 158–59.
216. Quoted in John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century,
Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 120.
217. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (New York: Penguin, 1965), 236.
218. Ibid., 33.
219. Ibid., 135.
220. Ibid.
221. Ibid., 288. For popular front see Jean-Paul Sartre and John Gerassi, Talk-
ing with Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009), 86.
222. Quoted in Gerassi 1989, 134.
223. Beauvoir 1965, 356.
224. Ibid., 374.
225. Paul Nizan, Aden, Arabie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987),
11–12 and 51.
226. Ibid., 50.
227. Ian Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004),
36–40. See also Ian Birchall, “Sartre and Gauchisme,” European Studies 19, no. 1
(March 1989): 21–53.
228. Quoted in John Gerassi, “The Comintern, the Fronts, and the CPUSA,” in New
Studies in the Politics and Culture of US Communism, ed. Michael E. Brown, Randy
Martin, Frank Rosengarten and George Snedeker (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1993), 84. Beauvoir argues that both she and Sartre saw the goal of the resistance as
restoring democracy, not fighting for socialism. See Beauvoir 1965, 536–37.
229. Birchall 2004, 112–15.
230. Andrei Zhdanov, “On Literature, Music and Philosophy,” Marxists Internet
Archive. https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/zhdanov/lit-music-philosophy
.htm.
231. Birchall 2004, 52–53.
232. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1988), 253.
233. Ibid., 257. In “Materialism and Revolution” Sartre said that Trotskyists were
not objectively police agents. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Aftermath of War (New York:
Seagull, 2008a), 185–87.
234. Quoted in Birchall 2004, 100. See also Ian Birchall, “Neither Washington nor
Moscow? The rise and fall of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire,”
Journal of European Studies vol. 29, issue 4 (Dec. 1999): 365–404.
235. Sartre and Gerassi 2009, 152.
236. Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre (New York: Little Brown, 1990),
445–46.
202 C
hapter Five
237. Merleau-Ponty 1964, 264–65. See also Sartre 1965, 264.

239. Ibid., 269.
240. Beauvoir 1977, 231–32.
241. Sartre 1965, 287–88.
242. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communists and the Peace (New York: George Bra-
ziller, 1968a), 85.
243. Ibid., 88.
244. Ibid., 295.
245. Ibid., 12.
246. Ernest Mandel, “Ernest Mandel—Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre. A Reply to ‘The
Communists and Peace,’” IIRE International Institute for Research and Education.
https://www.iire.org/node/962.
248. Ibid., 132.
249. Ibid., 193.
250. Ibid. 158.
251. Ibid. 198.
252. “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” in Beauvoir 2021, 207. Sartre him-
self identified with Beauvoir’s reply in Sartre 1965, 318.
253. “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” in Beauvoir 2021, 211.
254. Ibid., 226 and 231. I also draw upon Ronald Aronson, “Vicissitudes of the
Dialectic: From Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic to Sartre’s Second Cri-
tique,” in The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1998), 249–50 and Kevin Gray, “Beauvoir Contra
Merleau-Ponty: How Simone de Beauvoir’s Defense of Sartre Prefigured “The
Critique of Dialectical Reason,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies vol. 23 (2006–2007):
75–81.
255. Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands (New York: Vintage, 1989), 218.
256. Beauvoir 1977, 149. See Birchall 2004, 85. The secretary in question was the
jazz musician Bernard Wolfe who was not present when Trotsky was assassinated.
257. Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quar-
rel that Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 167.
258. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Ghost of Stalin (New York: George Braziller, 1968b), 14.
259. Ibid., 22.
260. Ibid., 71.
261. Ibid., 78.
262. C. L. R. James, “10 February 1957 letter,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed.
Anna Grimshaw (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 267–68.
263. Sartre 1968b, 142.
264. Ibid., 128.
265. Ibid., 135.
266. Sartre 1968c, xxxiv.
267. The second volume was published posthumously in French in 1985 with an
English translation appearing in 1991.
268. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume I: Theory of

Practical Ensembles (New York: Verso, 2004), 125.
269. Ibid., 132.
270. Ibid., 662.
271. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume II: The Intelligi-
bility of History (New York: Verso, 2006), 105. See also Ronald Aronson, “Sartre and
the Dialectic: The Purposes of Critique II,” Yale French Studies (1985): 96.
272. Sartre 2006, 107.
273. Ibid., 100.
274. Ibid.
275. Ibid., 129.
276. Ibid., 106.
277. Ibid., 101.
278. Ibid., 176.
279. István Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge
of History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 248.
280. Ibid.
281. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New
York: Grove Press, 1963), 24–25.
282. Quoted in Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York:
Grove Press, 1997), 446.
283. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Verso,
2008b), 60. Beauvoir recalled that Sartre had not expected the protests of May
1968. See Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (New York: Pantheon,
1985), 371.
284. Quoted in Birchall 2004, 213. For his remarks on Soviet imperialism, see
Sartre 2008b, 119.
285. For his positive view of French Maoism, see Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Mao-
ists in France,” in Sartre in the Seventies: Interviews and Essays (London: Andre
Deutch, 1978), 162–71. However, Sartre was still in dialogue with Trotskyists, even
if he rejected their approach to elections. In 1973, he argued that the Trotskyist Ligue
communiste révolutionnaire should fuse with the Maoists. See Birchall 1989, 44.
Sartre admitted that he did not know much about Maoism: “I regard myself as very
inadequately informed about the Cultural Revolution.” See Sartre 2008b, 57.
286. “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” in Sartre 1978, 84–85.
Chapter Six
From Proletarian Jacobinism

to Stalinist Thermidor
A. PROLETARIAN JACOBINISM
As already discussed, the international communist movement viewed

Stalinism in vulgar Hegelian terms as the realization of reason in his-
tory. Napoleon riding on horseback was replaced by Stalin in a tank as the
world-spirit. Yet there were communists, such as Leon Trotsky, who did
not see Stalinism as the natural evolution of Bolshevism, but as histori-
cally unnecessary. To explain how Stalinism overcame Bolshevism, Trotsky
sought answers in the fate of the French Revolution.1
Trotsky was not alone in turning to 1789 for theoretical inspiration. A long
history of Russian radicals from Alexander Herzen to Pyotr Tkachev looked
to the French Revolution, Jacobinism, and the Enlightenment. Western
socialists also looked at Russia through the prism of the French Revolution.
Surveying czarist Russia in 1885, Friedrich Engels happily observed:
What I know, or believe I know, of the situation in Russia leads me to think

that that country is nearing its 1789. Revolution is bound to break out some
time or other; it may break out any day. In conditions such as these the country
is like a charged mine, all that is needed is to apply the match. . . . In a place
where the situation is so tense, where revolutionary elements have accumulated
to such a degree, where the economic situation of the vast mass of the people
becomes daily more impossible, where every degree of social development
is represented, from the primitive commune to modern big industry and high
finance, and where all these contradictions are forcibly pent up by an unheard-of
despotism—a despotism increasingly unacceptable to a younger generation in
which are combined the nation’s intelligence and dignity—in such a place 1789,
once launched, will before long be followed by 1793.2
205
206 Chapter Six
For Engels, the Romanov dynasty was in a similar state to the French
Bourbons. The Russian Empire was a mass of contradictions as dying feu-
dalism clashed with the emergent powers of capitalism. The Russian ancien
régime was too intransigent and incapable of fundamental reforms. Below
the czar, the peasantry, workers, and the bourgeoisie all found themselves in
opposition.
The first generation of Russian Marxists agreed with Engels that Russia
would follow in the footsteps of the French Revolution. They eagerly
expected to play the parts of Robespierre, Marat, Saint-Just, and Danton
in this forthcoming revolution. The father of Russian Marxism, Georgi
Plekhanov, seemed to be an early contender for the role of Robespierre. He
believed that a Russian 1789 was on the near horizon. However, Plekhanov
did not think the Russian bourgeoisie possessed the same heroism and revo-
lutionary fervor as its French ancestors. He said that the Russian bourgeoisie
was too weak and cowardly to lead the struggle against czarism. That task
fell to the urban proletariat. Just as the Jacobins were not merely a faction
of the radical bourgeoisie, but led the sansculottes and peasantry, Plekhanov
believed that the proletariat must play a similar role by leading all the
oppressed against the Romanovs. As Plekhanov declared at the centenary of
the French Revolution in 1889: “the revolutionary movement in Russia will
triumph only as a working-class movement or else it will never triumph!”3
For the working class to play this historical role, Plekhanov said they
needed a political organization modeled on the Jacobins. In 1900, Plekhanov,
Lenin, and Julius Martov set up the journal Iskra to provide the ideological
nucleus for this proletarian Jacobin party. At the Second Congress of the
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party held in 1903, supporters of Iskra
commanded an overwhelming majority. Their speeches at the congress were
filled with Jacobin intransigence. At one point, Plekhanov said: “Every demo-
cratic principle must be considered not by itself, abstractly, but in relation to
that which may be called the fundamental principle of democracy, namely
salus populi suprema lex. Translated into the language of the revolutionist,
this means that the success of the revolution is the highest law.”4
A split developed at the congress between the “hards” led by Lenin and the
“softs” led by Martov. This split would later be consummated in the creation
of separate parties known to history as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the
course of the Russian Revolution, these two factions would prove analogous
to the earlier division in France between the Jacobins and the Girondists. As
Trotsky wrote later: “Already in the days of Iskra, Plekhanov wrote that in
the world socialist movement two different tendencies were developing and
it was an open question whether the revolutionary struggles of the twentieth
century might lead to a break between the Social Democratic ‘Mountain’
and the Social Democratic Gironde.”5 For a brief moment, Plekhanov found
From Proletarian Jacobinism to Stalinist Thermidor 207
himself in the ranks of Lenin’s “hards,” but he did not stay long. As he
said: “I cannot fire against my own comrades. Better a bullet in the brain
than a split . . . There are times when even the autocracy has to give in.”6
Ultimately, Plekhanov lacked the fortitude needed to play Robespierre’s part.
Almost right away, Lenin’s opponents accused him of possessing Jacobin
and dictatorial tendencies. Speaking of Lenin, Plekhanov declared: “Of such
stuff the Robespierres are made.”7 The Menshevik leader Alexander Potresov
said something similar: “Lenin alone embodied the phenomenon, rare every-
where but especially in Russia, of a man of iron will, inexhaustible energy,
combining a fanatical faith in the movement, in the cause, with an equal faith
in himself.”8 The Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg accused Lenin of
creating a centralized Jacobin-Blanquist organization that was alien to the
tradition of social democracy: “Such centralism is a mechanical transposition
of the organisational principles of Blanquism into the mass movement of
the socialist working class.”9 Yet it was the young Leon Trotsky, then close
to Menshevism, who was the loudest in his condemnation of “Maximilien
Lenin.” In Our Political Tasks, Trotsky said that social democracy and
Jacobinism were diametrically opposed. He prophesized that Lenin’s Jacobin
party would end up stifling internal democracy by creating a dictatorship:
“In the internal politics of the Party these methods lead, as shall be seen
below, to the Party organisation ‘substituting’ itself for the Party, the Central
Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dicta-
tor substituting himself for the Central Committee.”10
Lenin himself did not hide his admiration for Jacobinism. He considered
the epithet to be a badge of honor that all revolutionaries should aspire to.
Responding to their polemics, Lenin said the “softs” were Girondin opportun-
ists who would betray the revolution:
These “dreadful words”—Jacobinism and the rest—are expressive of opportun-

ism and nothing else. A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organ-
isation of the proletariat—a proletariat conscious of its class interests—is
a revolutionary Social-Democrat. A Girondist who sighs after professors and
high-school students, who is afraid of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and
who yearns for the absolute value of democratic demands is an opportunist.11
However, Lenin viewed Bolshevism not as a mere repetition of Jacobinism,

but its continuation in the shape of Proletarian Jacobinism. He argued for a
dialectical development and deepening of Jacobinism’s rational characteris-
tics. Therefore, he rejected Jacobin elitism and voluntarism as irrational and
outmoded, but took what was rational in Jacobinism, namely the need for
revolutionary theory, leadership, mass mobilization, organization, discipline,
208 Chapter Six
and—if need be—terror. These characteristics formed the basis of Lenin’s

Proletarian Jacobinism that would challenge the czarist autocracy.12
When the 1905 revolution began, Russian social democrats looked back
to 1789 for lessons on strategy and tactics. The Mensheviks, particularly
Plekhanov and Martov, argued that a bourgeois revolution was the immedi-
ate task in Russia. They followed the French model literally, claiming that
since the bourgeoisie was the leading force in the revolution, that the workers
should not raise any radical demands to frighten them. Lenin accused the
“Girondists of contemporary Russian Social-Democracy” of acting like the
“representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie, [who] wish to settle accounts with
the autocracy gently, in a reformist way.”13
Lenin also saw the parallels between the two revolutions. He agreed with
the Mensheviks that Russia was facing its bourgeois revolution, but argued
that it was the working class who would play the leading role, not the bour-
geoisie. The capitalists were too tied up materially and politically with the
czar and scared of organizing the proletariat. Therefore, it fell to the workers
to remove czarism in a revolutionary way: “If the revolution gains a decisive
victory—then we shall settle accounts with tsarism in the Jacobin, or, if you
like, in the plebeian way.”14 Lenin noticed another Russian similarity to the
French Revolution in that social democrats were divided between moderates
and radicals:
By our parallel we merely want to explain that the representatives of the progres-
sive class of the twentieth century, the proletariat, i.e., the Social-Democrats, are
divided into two wings (the opportunist and the revolutionary) similar to those
into which the representatives of the progressive class of the eighteenth century,
the bourgeoisie, were divided, i.e., the Girondists and the Jacobins.15
Lastly, there was Trotsky, who was in agreement with both Lenin and Martov
that 1905 was Russia’s bourgeois revolution. Trotsky agreed with Lenin that
the working class needed to lead the future struggle for power. However,
Trotsky diverged from both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks by stating the
forthcoming revolution would not stop halfway with bourgeois-democracy,
but would go further and institute socialist measures. Since the stages of the
revolution would proceed from one to the other without interruption, Trotsky
said that Russia would undergo a permanent revolution. Alexander Parvus,
Trotsky’s co-thinker, believed that the socialist revolution would complete
the work begun in 1789: “Political revolution is the foundation of the pro-
gramme of Social Democrats in all countries—the proletarian revolution
that will complete the cycle of revolutions that began with the Great French
Revolution.”16
The storms of 1905 led Trotsky to soften his unremitting hostility to

Jacobinism. Like Lenin, he recognized that the opportunists slurred revolu-
tionary social democrats as Jacobins. Trotsky noted that now the cowardly
bourgeoisie was frightened of its own Jacobin heritage:
Bourgeois hatred of revolution, its hatred towards the masses, hatred of the force
and grandeur of the history that is made in the streets, is concentrated in one cry
of indignation and fear –Jacobinism! . . . The proletariat, however radically it
may have, in practice, broken with the revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoi-
sie, nevertheless preserves them, as a sacred heritage of great passions, heroism
and initiative, and its heart beats in sympathy with the speeches and acts of the
Jacobin Convention.17
Trotsky accepted that the proletariat and socialism were the rightful heirs to
the Jacobin legacy.
Twelve years later in 1917, all the camps of the left again looked to the
French Revolution as a source of guidance and legitimacy. It seemed that all
the actors of that year were ready to don the costumes of 1789 and 1793. Yet
the bourgeoisie could no longer play the part of the Jacobins in a proletar-
ian revolution. The supposedly liberal bourgeois Cadets were closer to the
Bourbons than the Mountain. The Bolsheviks eagerly put on the Phrygian
caps and saw a future revolutionary government following the precedent
set by the Committee of Public Safety. As Lenin said: “It is natural for the
bourgeoisie to hate Jacobinism. It is natural for the petty bourgeoisie to dread
it. The class-conscious workers and working people generally put their trust
in the transfer of power to the revolutionary, oppressed class for that is the
essence of Jacobinism, the only way out of the present crisis, and the only
remedy for economic dislocation and the war.”18
If Lenin was stepping into Robespierre’s shoes, then Trotsky was playing
multiple roles. At the Modern Circus, where mass meetings were held, his
mesmerizing oratory with its uncompromising revolutionary fire recalled
the thundering voices of Marat and Danton. Like Danton, Trotsky found his
place beside Lenin-Robespierre. At the First Congress of Soviets in June,
Plekhanov claimed for himself the part of Danton by advocating a revolu-
tionary war against Germany. Trotsky chided him as unworthy of the mantle.
Deutscher noted that Plekhanov was left uncast in the revolutionary drama:
“Little did the sick veteran imagine that it was his younger and much snubbed
opponent who was destined for the role of the Russian Danton, destined to
make the Russian armies ‘drink the sap of revolution.’”19
As in 1905, the Mensheviks refused to support Jacobin measures for fear of
terrifying the bourgeoisie. Rather, they found themselves supporting the lib-
eral Provisional Government and restraining radical actions by the workers.
210 Chapter Six
Trotsky condemned the Mensheviks for their cowardice and said that they
were now in the camp of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie:
Robespierre, to whom it was not given to acquaint himself with the ideas of
Plekhanov, upset all the laws of Sociology, and, instead of shaking hands with
the Girondists, he cut off their heads. This was cruel, there is no denying it. But
this cruelty did not prevent the French Revolution from becoming Great, within
the limits of its bourgeois character. . . . Instead of making the power in its hands
the organ for the realization of the essential demands of History, our fraudulent
democracy deferentially passed on all real power to the counter revolutionary,
military-imperialist clique, and Tseretelli, at the Moscow Conference, even
boasted that the Soviets had not surrendered their power under pressure, not
after a courageous fight and defeat, but voluntarily, as an evidence of political
“self-effacement.” The gentleness of the calf, holding its neck for the butcher’s
knife, is not the quality which is going to conquer new worlds.20
Like Lenin, Trotsky understood that the Proletarian Jacobinism of 1917

would not follow the same pattern as its bourgeois ancestor. The age of bour-
geois ascendency had passed. The proletariat was now mounting the stage of
history. The vision of Proletarian Jacobinism was not the Republic of Virtue,
but the Communist Age of Reason.
In addition to Jacobinism, the specter of Bonaparte haunted 1917. The
moderate socialists recoiled from Jacobinism in part because they believed
it would be followed by terror and a Bonapartist dictatorship that would
end the revolution. Yet this restoration of law and order was precisely what
the Russian bourgeoisie wanted. They searched for a dashing and charis-
matic figure to play Bonaparte. Among the contenders was the leader of the
Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky. After first imitating the ora-
tory of Marat, Kerensky began dressing in a military tunic and passionately
calling for the defense of the revolution against foreign invaders. As Trotsky
noted, Kerensky was ill-suited to play Napoleon: “While lacking the force of
Bonapartism, Kerenskyism had all its vices. It lifted itself above the nation
only to demoralize the nation with its own impotence.”21 A more promising
audition for Bonaparte came from General Lavr Kornilov, who appeared to
the elite as a savior on horseback. In August and September 1917, Kornilov
launched a coup to restore stability. This coup collapsed almost immedi-
ately as the soldiers fraternized with revolutionaries. As Trotsky said about
Kornilov: “if this was Bonaparte, it was but a pale shadow of him.”22 Despite
several auditions, the part of Bonaparte remained uncast in 1917.
After taking power in October, the Bolsheviks had brief hopes that they
would not need to resort to Terror. Lenin remarked: “Ours is not the French
revolutionary terror which guillotined unarmed people, and I hope we shall
not go so far.”23 However, the Bolsheviks found themselves in almost the
same position as the Jacobins. The new Soviet Republic faced civil war, for-
eign invasion, peasant uprisings, and economic collapse. Lenin and Trotsky
understood that the survival of the revolution required Jacobin measures.
To lead the new organ of terror known as the Cheka, the Bolsheviks
looked for someone in their ranks who was beyond reproach. As Lenin said:
“We must find a staunch proletarian Jacobin.”24 They decided that the for-
mer Polish noble and political prisoner, Feliks Dzerzhinsky would head the
Cheka. Cut in the Jacobin mold, Dzerzhinsky was an advocate of mass terror
against enemies of the revolution:
We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an

absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the
enemies of Soviet power and of the new order of life. Among such enemies
are our political opponents as well as bandits, swindlers, speculators, and other
criminals who undermine the foundations of socialist power. In dealing with
such persons we show no mercy. We terrorize the enemies of Soviet power in
order to suppress crime at its roots.25
Dzerzhinsky was not the only advocate for terror. All the Bolsheviks saw the
Red Terror as essential to combat the very real threat of the White Terror.
Harkening back to the Incorruptible or Robespierre himself, Trotsky said
that the Red Terror was an expression of popular will needed to suppress the
bourgeoisie. In Terrorism and Communism (1920), Trotsky told Karl Kautsky
and the Girondins of international social democracy: “You do not understand
this, holy men? We shall explain to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed
against the proletariat. The gendarmerie of Tsarism throttled the workers who
were fighting for the Socialist order. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot
landlords, capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist
order. Do you grasp this . . . distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite
sufficient.”26 Neither Robespierre nor Saint-Just could have defended the
necessity of terror any better than Trotsky.
As the founder of the Red Army, Trotsky called upon its soldiers to revive
the traditions of Jacobinism as the way to victory:
I have referred to the French revolution. Yes, comrades, we need to revive the
traditions of that revolution, to the full. Remember how the Jacobins in France
spoke, even while the war was still going on, about complete victory, and how
the Girondins screamed at them: ‘You talk about what you are going to do after
victory: have you then made a pact with victory?’ One of the Jacobins replied:
‘We have made a pact with death.’ The working class cannot be defeated. We
are sons of the working class: we have made our pact with death and, therefore,
with victory!27
212 Chapter Six
Like the Revolutionary Armies of the First Republic, the Red Army used a
levée en masse to conscript peasants and workers into its service. To ensure
the loyalty of the czarist officers recruited by the Red Army, a system of
commissars modeled on the French représentant en mission was created. In
the end, Trotsky was correct that the Jacobin model helped to ensure the final
victory of the Red Army.
The Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary opponents of Soviet power
warned that Bolshevik methods would lead to the same bloody end as
Jacobinism. Martov said the expulsion of the Cadet Party from the Constituent
Assembly was the first step on the road to Bonapartism: “Had Danton and
Robespierre lived to see that moment when, out of a series of ‘surgical opera-
tions’ performed on the Convention and later on the Legislative Assembly,
Bonapartism emerged, they might perhaps have bequeathed the advice to
Larin not to copy slavishly all the ‘primitives’ of previous revolutions.”28
A year later, Martov declared that the soviets were not heirs to the Paris
Commune of 1871, but the Jacobin Terror: “If in their quest for historic analo-
gies, Lenin, Trotsky and Radek had shown a greater knowledge of the past,
they would not have tried to tie the genealogy of the Soviets to the Commune
of 1871 but to the Paris Commune of 1793–94 which was a center of revolu-
tionary energy and power very similar to the institution of their own time.”29
Naturally, Martov saw soviet power ending with the same tyranny that con-
sumed the Commune of 1793.
Abroad, supporters of the Bolsheviks considered them worthy heirs
to Robespierre and Jacobinism. In The Russian Revolution (1918), Rosa
Luxemburg celebrated Bolshevik daring and courage: “The Bolsheviks are
the historic heirs of the English Levellers and the French Jacobins,” they
were the “first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the
world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: ‘I have
dared!’”30
Despite her overall solidarity with the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg
was not an uncritical supporter. Her support for the Bolsheviks did not pre-
vent Luxemburg from harshly criticizing what she considered to be mistaken
and dangerous in Soviet policies. She took issue with the Bolsheviks on their
support for national self-determination, land to the tiller, their dispersal of the
Constituent Assembly, and curtailment of socialist democracy.
On the matter of socialist democracy, Luxemburg said that it required the
rule of the working class and not a small elite group in its place:
Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favor of dictatorship in contra-
distinction to democracy, and thereby, in favor of the dictatorship of a handful
of persons, that is, in favor of dictatorship on the bourgeois model. . . . [The
working class] should and must at once undertake socialist measures in the most
energetic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words, exercise a dictator-

ship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique-dictatorship of
the class, that means in the broadest public form on the basis of the most active,
unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.”31
Luxemburg warned that socialism could not be instituted by decree, but

needed the active participation of the working class in its construction. If
democratic freedoms were rolled back, then this would freeze the working
class out of political life in favor of minority rule:
Without a free and untrammeled press, without the unlimited right of association
and assemblage, the rule of the broad masses of the people is entirely unthink-
able. . . . Freedom only for supporters of the government, only for the members
of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom
is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.32
However, Luxemburg recognized that the Bolsheviks were caught in an

impossible situation of building socialism in a backward country as they
fought off counterrevolutionary armies without any rescue by the Western
proletariat. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, she wrote to Luise Kautsky:
are you glad about the Russians? Of course they will not be able to maintain
themselves in this witches’ Sabbath—not because the statistics show that they
are too backward as your clever husband has worked out, but because Social
Democracy in the highly developed West consists of a pack of piteous cowards
who are prepared to look on quietly and let Russia bleed to death. But such an
end is better than “living on for the fatherland”; it is an act of world historical
significance whose traces will not be extinguished for aeons.33
Rosa Luxemburg was aware of the material conditions under which the
Bolsheviks acted and how they adapted to those pressures. However, she
feared that they were rationalizing too many concessions and giving ground
too quickly:
It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades

if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure
forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat
and a flourishing socialist economy. By their determined revolutionary stand,
their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international
socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under
such devilishly hard conditions. The danger begins only when they make a
virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the
tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend
them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics.34
214 Chapter Six
Yet considering the desperate straits of the Soviet Republic, how could the
Bolsheviks not have done otherwise? Voting the Bolsheviks out of power
took on a different meaning in civil war conditions. When the Bolsheviks
in Baku stepped down, they were subsequently shot by the counterrevolu-
tion.35 The only alternative to the Bolsheviks was not an idealized social-
ist democracy, but a victorious White counterrevolution. As the historian
William Chamberlin observed, “the alternative to Bolshevism, had it failed
to survive the ordeal of civil war . . . would not have been Chernov, opening
a Constituent Assembly . . . but a military dictator, a Kolchak or a Denikin,
riding into Moscow on a white horse.”36 Material circumstances dictated
that the Bolsheviks use emergency measures and terror since the only other
option was the triumph of White reactionaries. Ultimately, it was Proletarian
Jacobinism that allowed the Soviet Republic to survive, albeit at a great cost.
Luxemburg did not believe that German communists had to follow the
example of Proletarian Jacobinism. In late December 1918, at the founding
convention of the Communist Party of Germany, Luxemburg said that the
socialist revolution did not need terror: “The proletarian revolution requires
no terror for its aims; it hates and despises killing. It does not need these
weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions, because it
does not enter the arena with naïve illusions whose disappointment it would
seek to revenge.”37
Yet the reality of revolutionary struggle caused changes in Luxemburg’s
ideas. Now, she counterposed workers’ councils to the German equivalent of
the Russian Constituent Assembly as the only true form of democracy: “What
was considered equality and democracy until now: parliaments, national
assemblies, equal ballots, was a pack of lies! Full power in the hands of the
working masses, as a weapon for smashing capitalism to pieces—this is the
only true equality, this is the only true democracy!”38 These words could eas-
ily have been written by Lenin or Trotsky.
In early 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the white terror at the
behest of the German Girondin Gustav Noske. Unfortunately, she never
had the opportunity to learn that a German socialist revolution required
Proletarian Jacobinism with its own Robespierre.
When the French Communist Party was founded at the Congress of Tours
in December 1920, the delegates clearly saw Bolshevism as Proletarian
Jacobinism. Marcel Cachin said: “[The Bolsheviks] know the French
Revolution better than we do.”39 Albert Mathiez, who joined the PCF, was a
historian of the French Revolution and a fervent admirer of Robespierre. He
saw the continuity between Jacobinism and Bolshevism:
History never repeats itself exactly. But the resemblances our analysis has
brought out between the great crises of 1793 and 1917 are neither superficial
nor fortuitous. The Russian revolutionaries willingly and knowingly imitate the
French revolutionaries. They are animated by the same spirit. They move about
amidst the same problems in an analogous atmosphere. The times are different.
Civilization has advanced over the past century and a quarter. But Russia owes
more to its backwards state than is ordinarily believed for its resemblance to the
agricultural and illiterate France of the end of the 18th century.40
In Spain, the syndicalist turned communist Andrés Nin spoke of Bolshevism

in words that echoed Plekhanov’s earlier Jacobinism:
The Russian Communist Party is the only guarantor of the Revolution; and just
as the Jacobins saw themselves obliged to guillotine the Hébertists even though
they represented a tendency to the Left, just as we ourselves have eliminated
those who constituted an obstacle to the realization of the objectives we pur-
sued, so our Russian comrades see themselves inevitably obliged to smother
implacably every attempt to break their power. It is not only their right but their
duty. The health of the Revolution is the supreme law.41
The foundation of the Communist International in March 1919 ensured

that the principles of Proletarian Jacobinism were spread to all corners of
the world.
However, not all the defenders of the Russian Revolution looked at the
Bolsheviks as latter-day Jacobins. Antonio Gramsci, then a journalist in
Turin, believed that the Bolsheviks were free of any Jacobin taint. He saw
Lenin as the heir to Gracchus Babeuf: “In the socialist revolution, Lenin has
not met the fate of Babeuf. He has been able to convert his thought into a
meaningful historical force. He has released energies that will never die.”42
Moreover, Gramsci said a communist party modeled on the Jacobin club
would be a “collection of dogmatists [and] little Machiavellis” that cynically
“makes use of the masses.”43 It was only during Gramsci’s years in prison
that he changed his mind on both Machiavelli and Robespierre. In his Prison
Notebooks, Gramsci saw the Communist Party as a Modern Prince that would
pursue a Jacobin strategy for hegemony. In his reassessment of classical
Jacobinism, Gramsci said: “The Jacobins, consequently, were the only party
of the revolution in progress, in as much as they not only represented the
immediate needs and aspirations of the actual physical individuals who con-
stituted the French bourgeoisie, but they also represented the revolutionary
movement as a whole, as an integral historical development.”44 Ultimately,
Gramsci’s own Proletarian Jacobinism owed as much to Robespierre as it did
to Machiavelli.45
It cannot be underestimated that all Russian Marxists, especially the
Bolsheviks, saw the French Revolution as the model for revolutionary poli-
tics. The experience of 1789 was a constant reference point in the revolutions
216 Chapter Six
of both 1905 and 1917. The Jacobins showed the necessity of a disciplined
organization and revolutionary government. However, Lenin and Trotsky
understood that Proletarian Jacobinism was not a simple continuation of the
past, but a new and higher development. The bourgeois revolution led by the
Jacobins could not fulfill the promises of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. But
it was the mission of Proletarian Jacobins to realize the universalist vision of
the Enlightenment by ending class society and creating communism.
B. TROTSKY’S ALTERNATIVE TO STALINISM
In early 1921, the Bolsheviks had emerged triumphant in the civil war. Yet
Russia was ruined with the economy in utter collapse. The Bolsheviks could
not count on any international aid to rebuild since the revolution had been
defeated in Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere. The Soviet Republic was
alone and the Bolsheviks faced the unenviable task of building socialism in
conditions of isolation and backwardness.
The immediate danger for the Bolsheviks was that they would not survive
their victory. A great deal of support for the Soviets had evaporated. The
peasantry, who had backed the Red Army during the civil war, was no longer
willing to tolerate the grain requisitions of War Communism. As a result,
thousands of peasant insurgents in the Tambov region bitterly fought the Red
Army. Most ominously at the naval base of Kronstadt, once a stronghold
of Bolshevism, the sailors rose in revolt, demanding a “third revolution.”
Trotsky said that the Kronstadt Mutiny represented the clear danger of a
counterrevolutionary Thermidor:
Of all prior counterrevolutionary movements in the Soviet Union, the near-

est type to Thermidor was the Kronstadt uprising of March 1921. . . . It was a
rebellion of the peasantry, hurt, discontented, and impatient with the proletar-
ian dictatorship. Had the petty bourgeoisie triumphed, on the very next day it
would have shown itself to be bankrupt, and in its place would have come the
big bourgeoisie itself.46
Lenin also saw the specter of Thermidor at Kronstadt. To forestall it, he rec-
ognized that the Bolsheviks needed to retreat: “This is Thermidor. But we
shant let ourselves be guillotined. We shall make a Thermidor ourselves.”47
Lenin was talking about concessions and a temporary retreat to market rela-
tions to regain revolutionary ground later, not a literal counterrevolutionary
restoration. Under Lenin’s guidance, War Communism was swiftly replaced
by the semi-market New Economic Policy.
While the Bolsheviks gained a breathing space with the NEP, this did not
mean they had ended the possibility of Thermidor. The NEP brought new
challenges. Now rich peasants or kulaks, who had previously been held in
check, gained immense influence throughout the countryside. In the cit-
ies, a new bourgeoisie known as NEP-men emerged as industry and trade
recovered. Inside the working class, the enthusiastic Jacobinism of the civil
war years slackened as a less unheroic mood set in. As Grigory Zinoviev
observed: “It is useless to deny that many militants are mortally weary.
They have to attend ‘Saturdays’ twice or four times a month, out of working
hours; excessive mental strain is demanded; their families live in difficult
conditions; they are sent here to-day and there to-morrow by the Party or by
chance; the result is inevitably psychological exhaustion.”48
There was also the danger of Thermidor from the Bolshevik party itself.
The civil war’s decimation of the working class and the atrophy of the soviets
meant that power was now concentrated in the ruling party. By the 1920s, the
Bolshevik party was one of the few institutions that could hold the country
together. Power was increasingly centralized around Stalin, the party’s gen-
eral secretary and head of the expanding bureaucratic apparatus.
Early on, Lenin feared that the party’s apparatus was saturated with czarist
authoritarianism and Great-Russian chauvinism. These symptoms appeared
in Stalin himself in his frayed relations with Georgian Communists.49 Lenin
worried that if this bureaucratic power was allowed to grow, then it would
mean Thermidor. By the end of his active political life in 1922–1923,
Lenin identified Stalin as the representative of this bureaucratic danger and
demanded his removal from the post of general secretary:
Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in
dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General.
That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin
from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects
differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being
more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades,
less capricious, etc.50
However, Lenin did not believe that removing a single person, even if it
was Stalin, would be enough to stop Thermidor. A far more reaching solu-
tion was needed to regenerate the revolution. Lenin laid out the first steps
for this strategy in his final writings, later known as his “Testament.” Lenin
recognized that the isolation and backwardness of Russia placed immense
burdens in the way of creating a truly socialist society. The lack of culture and
advanced industry was the soil that allowed the bureaucratic cancer to gnaw
away at socialism. To overcome this difficulty, Lenin advocated a “cultural
218 Chapter Six
revolution,” where the masses would master bourgeois culture in order to rid
themselves of feudal habits and customs: “For a start, we should be satisfied
with real bourgeois culture; for a start we should be glad to dispense with the
crude types of pre-bourgeois culture, i.e., bureaucratic culture or serf culture,
etc. In matters of culture, haste and sweeping measures are most harmful.”51
Lenin recognized that successfully completing this cultural revolution would
take years, if not decades, but it was necessary to begin now. He considered
this cultural transformation a prerequisite to make the working class fit to rule.
In addition to a cultural revolution, Lenin said that the social weight of the
proletariat in Soviet Russia must be increased so it could lead society. To cre-
ate the material preconditions for socialism, he advocated the industrializa-
tion and electrification of the country. Industrialization would also allow the
state to support the formation of cooperatives in the countryside. Lenin said
that the combination of cooperatives and the cultural revolution would give
the peasants a stake in the construction of socialism:
Now we are entitled to say that for us the mere growth of cooperation . . . is
identical with the growth of socialism, and at the same time we have to admit
that there has been a radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism.
The radical modification is this; formerly we placed, and had to place, the main
emphasis on the political struggle, on revolution, on winning political power,
etc. Now the emphasis is changing and shifting to peaceful, organizational,
“cultural” work. I should say that emphasis is shifting to educational work, were
it not for our international relations, were it not for the fact that we have to fight
for our position on a worldscale.52
Lenin insisted that the cooperative movement must be wholly voluntary.

While it would take time to convince the peasantry, in the end this effort
would solidify the worker-peasant alliance and ensure the victory of socialism.
However, Lenin did not believe that socialism could be created in an iso-
lated Russia. For the moment, he argued that Russia could only take the first
steps on the road to socialism. Yet Lenin did not doubt that the tempo of the
world revolution would pick up again:
In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact
that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the
population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that
has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity,
so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome
of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is
fully and absolutely assured.53
Regrettably, Lenin was not able to implement his new program. He suffered
a series of strokes that relegated him to the sidelines of political life. When
Lenin died in January 1924, Thermidor had grown even more menacing to
the revolution.
After the defeat of the German October in 1923, it seemed to many in
the party that Russia was facing a long-term period of isolation. Breaking
with Bolshevik orthodoxy on internationalism, Stalin advanced the theory
of socialism in one country. Stalin argued that it was necessary for Russia
to construct socialism without waiting for an international revolution. Many
communists found this idea very appealing. They were exhausted and longed
for security. It also stoked latent national pride, promising an almost messianic
mission for Russia in leading the international working class to socialism.
Socialism in one country also became Stalin’s bludgeon that he used
against Trotsky. On the surface Stalin appeared to have faith in the people and
their ability to build socialism while Trotsky was portrayed as a defeatist. As
Stalin said in 1926:
Well, as the victory of the revolution in the West is rather late in coming, nothing
remains for us to do, apparently, but to loaf around. The congress held, and said
so in its resolution on the report of the Central Committee, that these views of
the opposition implied disbelief in victory over our capitalists. . . . But from the
support of the workers of the West to the victory of the revolution in the West is
a long, long way. . . . The opposition, however, affirms that we cannot finish off
our capitalists by our own efforts. That is the difference between us.54
In contrast to Stalin’s “realism,” Trotsky was painted as an abstract cosmo-

politan dreamer who could not understand the practical needs of the moment.
Moreover, Trotsky’s opposition to the party line on socialism in one country
allowed Stalin to depict him as a splitter who endangered the party and the
revolution. It is in Stalin that one finds the source for all arguments repeated
later by Bloch, Brecht, Lukács, Hobsbawm, Sartre, and others that socialism
in one country was the only viable option for the Soviet Union.
Yet an analysis of Trotsky’s actual program reveals a different picture.
Its contents show that Trotsky did not argue for the USSR to simply wait
with folded arms for deliverance from the international revolution. While
Trotsky’s ideas underwent changes over time, they were based on a consis-
tent, realistic, and unified strategy to achieve socialism. Ernest Mandel listed
the following core elements of Trotsky’s program:
Accelerated industrialization creating the basis for gradual mechanization of

agriculture; accelerated differentiation of the peasantry not in favour but at
the expense of the rich peasants; accelerated turn towards increased political
220 Chapter Six
activity of the poor in city and countryside, and therefore accelerated democra-
tization—these were the consistent elements of Trotsky’s programme.55
Like Lenin, Trotsky said that the construction of socialism could only hap-
pen by increasing the overall social weight of the working class in the USSR.
This was the rationale behind his calls for industrialization and creating a
planned economy: “We demanded acceleration of industrialization because
it is the only way to secure a leading position for the cities in relation to the
countryside, and thus in the dictatorship of the proletariat.”56 The expansion
of industry would not only improve living standards, but increase the number
of workers in Soviet society.
Furthermore, Trotsky shared Lenin’s belief in the necessity of a cultural
revolution. This would raise the cultural level of the masses, so they became
fit to rule and would not reproduce systems of oppression and domination
under a socialist veneer. Trotsky knew that the battle against backward ideas
could not occur in a vacuum. It must be carried out in conjunction with
uprooting the material conditions that engendered them. Hence, he argued
that a cultural revolution required industrialization and developing the pro-
ductive forces:
even the slightest successes in the sphere of morals, by raising the cultural level
of the working man and woman, enhance our capacity for rationalizing produc-
tion, and promoting socialist accumulation. This again gives us the possibility of
making fresh conquests in the sphere of morals. Thus a dialectical dependence
exists between the two spheres.57
Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union was threatened by the bureaucracy,
which wanted to keep the masses away from power. If socialism was going
to be a reality, then the power of the bureaucrats needed to be reduced. For
Trotsky, the dictatorship of the proletariat could only become a reality once
the workers were in firm democratic control of the soviets, trade unions, and
the party. 58
Trotsky believed that without the timely development of industry then
major problems loomed in the countryside due to the “scissors crisis.” While
the NEP had restored production, it had caused a major economic imbal-
ance. Agricultural production had increased to a higher degree than industrial
production. This meant peasants could only sell grain in the towns at very
high prices. This also increased the power of the kulaks at the expense of the
urban proletariat. Trotsky said that if the scissors crisis was not dealt with
then the kulaks would blackmail the towns: “The smychka [worker-peasant
alliance] is threatened at this moment by the lag in industry, on the one hand,
and by the growth of the kulak, on the other.”59 To forestall a crisis, Trotsky
demanded measures against the kulaks, but the Stalin-Bukharin leadership

downplayed this danger. Eventually, the scissors crisis culminated in the grain
strike of 1927–1928 when Stalin was compelled to use emergency measures
against the kulaks. A year later, Stalin eliminated the kulaks by forcibly col-
lectivizing agriculture.60
Arguably, Trotsky’s program for agriculture could have staved off, or at
least made less severe, the grain strike and the resurgence of class warfare
in the countryside. He had repeatedly warned that unless the demands of the
village were met, then the peasantry would turn against the working class. To
satisfy their consumer demands, Trotsky said it was necessary to draw upon
the reserves of the world market to fill the gaps in Soviet industry. According
to Richard Day, Trotsky’s plan involved a system of comparative coefficients
which would compare the efficiency of Soviet production in terms of price and
quality with that of other countries. These coefficients would then serve as a
guide both to the import plan and new investments. Domestic production would
be rationalized and standardized in order to lengthen runs and reduce costs. In
the meantime he urged that “commodity intervention” be undertaken in those
areas where the coefficient was least satisfactory. Inexpensive foreign goods
were to be sold in the Soviet market the profits being used to subsidize retail
prices of the corresponding domestic commodity. The proposal for commod-
ity intervention was designed to provide a short-run solution to the scissors.
Trotsky’s longer-run intention was to use the grain thus brought to market in
order to finance the import of new industrial equipment.61
Trotsky cautioned that any links with the world market must be condi-
tional, otherwise the Soviet Union would be transformed into a dependency
of imperialism. Yet in the short to medium term, Trotsky believed that
this system of coefficients would solve the scissors crisis and secure the
worker-peasant alliance.
While Trotsky did not envision a future for individual peasant farms, he
did not advocate the immediate collectivization of agriculture. He said that
collectivization could only occur once the material base for it was created:
The growth of land-renting must be offset by a more rapid development of col-

lective farming. It is necessary systematically and from year to year to subsidize
largely the efforts of the poor peasants to organize in collectives. At the same
time, we must give more systematic help to poor peasants not included in the
collectives, by freeing them entirely from taxation, by a corresponding land
policy, by credits for agricultural implements, and by bringing them into the
agricultural co-operatives.62
222 Chapter Six
Going forward, Trotsky believed that the party should heavily tax the kulaks
while encouraging strictly voluntary measures such as the development of
cooperatives.
As a matter of principle, both Trotsky and his supporters ruled out the
forced collectivization of agriculture. For example, the economist Evgeny
Preobrazhensky, who was an ally of Trotsky, was accused by Bukharin of
supporting the methods of primitive capitalist accumulation in the Soviet
countryside. However, this was a distortion of what Preobrazhensky said in
his major theoretical work, The New Economics:
Let us now dwell upon the methods of primitive accumulation which we

have enumerated, based mainly on plundering of small-scale production and
non-economic pressure upon it, and let us see how matters stand in this con-
nection in the period of primitive socialist accumulation. As regard colonial
plundering, a socialist state, carrying out a policy of equality between nationali-
ties and voluntary entry by them into one kind or another of union of nations,
repudiates on principle all the forcible methods of capital in this sphere. This
source of primitive accumulation is closed to it from the very start and forever.63
When it came to the international revolution, Trotsky argued that socialism

in one country was premised on ignoring conditions in the rest of the world.
However, Russia could not just pretend that imperialism did not exist. At the
Fifteen Party Conference in November 1926, Trotsky mocked Bukharin’s
claims that Russia could abstract itself from the international situation:
Just listen to this: “Whether we can work toward socialism, and establish it, if
we abstract this question from the international factors.” If we accomplish this
“abstraction,” then of course the rest is easy. But we cannot. That is the whole
point. [Laughter.]
It is possible to walk naked in the streets of Moscow in January, if we can

abstract ourselves from the weather and the police. [Laughter.] But I am afraid
that this abstraction would fail, both with respect to weather and to police, were
we to make the attempt.64
In the final analysis, the Soviet Union could only hold out, but it could not
create socialism on its own. Therefore, the Communist International had an
obligation to promote revolutionary leaderships in every section and to seize
all opportunities to advance the international revolution. For Trotsky, one
of the main drawbacks of socialism in one country was the tacit subordina-
tion of communist parties to the needs of Soviet diplomacy. This hamstrung
their ability to act as revolutionary vanguards. The mistaken policies of the
Comintern had already contributed to defeats in Britain, China, and elsewhere
which further isolated the USSR. In the end, Trotsky believed that socialism
in one country jeopardized both the Soviet Union and the world revolution.
While the objective conditions to implement Trotsky’s program did exist,
this is not to deny that he made subjective errors. He was often hesitant,
too conciliatory, and unable to construct needed political alliances. Nor did
Trotsky fight in an uncompromising manner for his program. For example,
Trotsky did not act decisively against Stalin at the Twelfth Party Congress
in April 1923. In inner-party struggle, Trotsky tied his hands in advance by
accepting the 1921 ban on factions and refusing to operate outside of official
circles. This meant Trotsky fought on terrain where Stalin had the political
advantage. Other subjective conditions weighed against Trotsky as well:
namely that Soviet workers were too passive and atomized, leaving them
unable to fight for the Left Opposition program.
Trotsky did not believe that the Soviet proletariat’s passivity was fixed
for a long period of time. A change in either the international situation or
the relation of forces inside the Soviet Union could radically change the
balance. This meant that correct intervention by the Communist Party could
act as a brake upon bureaucratic degeneration and reawaken the proletariat.
Ultimately, this did not occur. However, this outcome was not inevitable since
Lenin and Trotsky offered a practical communist program to slow down, if
not halt, Stalinism altogether.
C. THE STALINIST THERMIDOR?
As already shown, the Bolsheviks looked to the French Revolution just as

much for examples to avoid as to emulate. In their ranks, the Bolsheviks anx-
iously searched for someone who could be a potential Napoleon, who would
bury the revolution and turn the instruments of terror against them. Lenin saw
this danger in the bureaucratic forces centered around Stalin. Yet the rest of
the party considered Stalin as an unlikely contender to usurp the revolution.
Instead, eyes turned toward Trotsky as the most likely candidate to don
Napoleon’s costume. Outwardly, Trotsky and Napoleon shared a great deal
in common. Both were charismatic, popular, and brilliant military com-
manders. Trotsky’s command of the Red Army gave him the power to carry
out a coup d’état and become the Soviet First Consul. His Napoleonic stat-
ure made it appear safer for the party to be run by a collective leadership.
Therefore, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev formed a troika to keep Trotsky
away from power.
Inside the party itself, the troika spread rumors about Trotsky’s Bonapartist
ambitions. The French Communist Alfred Rosmer remembered hearing these
whispers in Moscow: “Trotsky thinks he is Bonaparte, Trotsky wants to
224 Chapter Six
play at being Bonaparte.”65 However, these tales were without foundation.

Trotsky recognized the politburo’s supremacy over the Red Army. When the
inner-party struggle escalated, Trotsky refused to use the Red Army to carry
out a coup d’état. When Trotsky was forced to resign his post as Commissar
of War in 1925, he did so without any protest.
In retrospect, Trotsky believed that he could have used the Red Army to
seize power, but he knew this would have been a fatal setback to the revolu-
tion. More than his enemies, Trotsky recognized what Bonapartism meant.
Instead, Trotsky intended to carry out the struggle against the bureaucracy by
using the political means of Bolshevism to awaken the working class:
There is no doubt that it would have been possible to carry out a military coup
d’etat against the faction of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, etc., without any diffi-
culty and without even the shedding of any blood; but the result of such a coup
d’etat would have been to accelerate the rhythm of this very bureaucratization
and Bonapartism against which the Left Opposition had engaged in struggle.
The task of the Bolshevik-Leninists was by its very essence not to rely on the
military bureaucracy against that of the party but to rely on the proletarian
vanguard and through it on the popular masses, and to master the bureaucracy
in its entirety, to purge it of its alien elements, to ensure the vigilant control
of the workers over it, and to set its policy back on the rails of revolutionary
internationalism.66
In the dramatis personae of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky adamantly

rejected the part of Napoleon.
Yet the danger of the revolution backsliding remained. Oppositionist
Bolsheviks saw in the NEP and the ballooning party bureaucracy the possibil-
ity of capitalist restoration. This raised the question of whether the Communist
Party itself was now counterrevolutionary. Should the Left Oppositionists
then use the analogies of Thermidor and Bonapartism to describe the current
situation? Trotsky argued that the analogy of Thermidor was perfectly valid:
To deny the danger of bourgeois restoration for the dictatorship of the proletariat
in a backward country under capitalist encirclement is inconceivable. Only a
Menshevik or a genuine capitulator who understands neither the international
nor the internal resources of our revolution could speak of the inevitability of
a Thermidor . . . The analogy with Thermidor makes the same kind of sense. It
teaches a great deal. Thermidor is a special form of counterrevolution carried
out on the installment plan through several installments, and making use, in the
first stage, of elements of the same ruling party-by regrouping them and coun-
terposing some to others.67
Trotsky argued that the Thermidorian danger came from Bukharin and
the party’s right wing, which drew its strength from non-proletarian ele-
ments such as the kulaks, the NEP-men, and the bureaucratic apparatus.
Yet Thermidor had not been consummated since the basic institutions of the
October Revolution remained in place. Until that changed, Trotsky believed
that Thermidor was not an accomplished fact.
Others in the party also saw the Thermidorian danger. After the troika
broke up, Zinoviev concluded that the revolution was degenerating. In
October 1925, Petr Zalutskii, a member of Zinoviev’s Leningrad Opposition,
described the “state capitalist” regime in the USSR and the Thermidorian
degeneration of the Communist Party. Stalin and Bukharin were outraged at
Zalutskii’s remarks, and he was swiftly expelled from the party.68
Judging by their response to Zalutskii, Bukharin and Stalin found that even
mentioning the possibility of Thermidor was tantamount to treason. Bukharin
condemned all talk of Thermidor by the Opposition as a “slander.”69 In 1927,
a supporter of Bukharin named Dmitrii Maretskii wrote an article in Pravda
directed against the Opposition where he summarily dismissed any talk of a
Thermidor, stating that “all analogies, from a Marxist point of view, [were]
nonsensical, absurd, and illiterate.”70
Knowing the French precedent, even Stalin, at that time, recoiled from
using fratricidal violence inside the Bolshevik Party. When Zinoviev and
Kamenev had demanded using punitive measures against Trotsky, Stalin
rejected them: “We have not agreed with Zinoviev and Kamenev, because we
have known that a policy of chopping off [heads] is fraught with great dan-
gers. . . . The method of chopping off and blood-letting - and they did demand
blood—is dangerous and infectious. You chop off one head to-day, another
one to-morrow, still another one the day after-what in the end will be left of
the party?”71 Later, Stalin accused the opposition of lying about Thermidor
and advocating civil war: “Of course, it is ludicrous to speak of Thermidor
tendencies of the Central Committee. I will say more: it is nonsense. I don’t
think that the opposition itself believes that nonsense, but it needs it as a
bogey. For if the opposition really believed that, then, of course, it should
have declared open war on our Party and on our Central Committee; but
it assures us that it wants peace in the Party.”72 Like Trotsky, Stalin clearly
understood the stakes of the debate over a Soviet Thermidor.
The opposition believed that if the party leadership was Thermidorian, then
it was unfit to defend the USSR against foreign invasion. Trotsky claimed
this with his invocation of Georges Clemenceau, who took over leadership
of the French war effort in 1917, ultimately leading the country to victory.
In September 1927, Trotsky argued that the opposition was willing to do the
same in the Soviet Union. They would remove the party’s leadership and con-
duct a war in a rigorous manner to victory: “Our war will be a socialist war.
226 Chapter Six
It can be led only by leaning for support upon the idealism of the proletariat
and the lower strata of the peasantry, only by holding in a vise the bourgeois-
kulak and the Thermidorian elements of the country.”73 Stalin believed that
Trotsky’s Clemenceau Thesis was traitorous and a sign of the opposition’s
underlying Menshevism:
The opposition says that we are in a state of Thermidor degeneration. What does
that mean? It means that we have not got the dictatorship of the proletariat, that
both our economics and our politics are a failure and are going backwards, that
we are not moving towards socialism, but towards capitalism. . . . It is on this
that Trotsky’s well-known thesis about Clemenceau is based. If the govern-
ment has degenerated, or is degenerating, is it worth while sparing, defending,
upholding it? Clearly, it is not worth while. . . . Clearly, there is nothing Leninist
in this “line.” It is Menshevism of the purest water. The opposition has slipped
into Menshevism.74
By 1926–1927, the struggle between Stalin and the opposition had shifted
from verbal and printed polemics to physical attacks. In what could be con-
sidered a Soviet parallel to the repression of the Jacobins during the French
Thermidor, the party majority had its own jeunesse dorée who assaulted the
opposition.75 The Soviet jeunesse dorée shouted down opposition speak-
ers and refused to admit its members to party meetings. Most notoriously,
they used anti-Semitic slurs against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev.
Trotsky appealed to Bukharin as a fellow party comrade to put a halt to this
anti-Jewish agitation:
I think that you and I—two members of the Politburo have after all a few things
in common, enough to calmly and conscientiously verify: (1) whether it is
possible that in our party, in Moscow, in a workers’ cell, propaganda is being
conducted with impunity which is vile and slanderous, on the one hand, and
anti-Semitic, on the other; and (2) whether honest workers are afraid to question
or verify or try to refute any stupidity, lest they be driven into the street with
their families.76
In response to Trotsky’s appeal, Bukharin threw up his hands in ignorance,

and the Politburo let the matter pass.
As their confrontation with Stalin escalated, Trotsky and the opposition
arguably found themselves stepping into the role of Gracchus Babeuf and the
Conspiracy of Equals. As Victor Serge noted: “We are babouvistes who still
have our heads on our shoulders.”77 If the Opposition were in fact Babuovists,
then there was no possibility of averting Thermidor and only a new revolution
was possible. Trotsky refused to accept this and was not willing to commit to
being the Soviet Babeuf.
The struggle came to a head on November 7, 1927, the tenth anniversary

of the revolution. At official commemorations, the opposition attempted to
raise banners with their own slogans. They called for actions against the
kulaks, NEP-men, and the bureaucrats. The police forcibly dispersed the
Oppositionist demonstrators. Mere days later, Trotsky and Zinoviev were
expelled from the Communist Party.
In protest against Trotsky’s expulsion, Soviet diplomat and oppositionist
Adolf Joffe, who was suffering a terminal illness, committed suicide. Joffe
left a farewell letter addressed to Trotsky where he expressed solidarity with
the defeated oppositionists. He said that Trotsky’s defeat was the Soviet
Thermidor. In his final words, Joffe noted Trotsky’s earlier weaknesses, but
said that his program was historically correct and he must still fight for it:
I should like to say that the great significance of the historical fact of the exclu-
sion from the Party of yourself and Zinoviev, which must inevitably be looked
upon as the beginning of the Thermidorian period of our revolution. . . .
I have never doubted that the way pointed out by you was the right way, and you
know that I have been going the same way as you for more than twenty years,
since the beginning of the “permanent revolution.”
But I have always been of opinion that you lack the inflexibility and firmness of
Lenin, that determination to stick to the path recognised as right, even if wholly
isolated, trusting in a future majority and a future recognition of the entire rec-
titude of your way.
Politically you have always been right, ever since 1905. And I have repeatedly
told you that I heard with my own ears how Lenin admitted that you and not
he was right in 1905. In the face of death men do not lie; and I repeat the same
again. But you have often renounced your own truth in favour of an agree-
ment, a compromise which you over-estimated. That was a mistake. I repeat,
politically you were right. And now more than ever. Once the Party will come
to recognise this, and history will appreciate it as it deserves.78
For the opposition, Joffe’s death was a terrible blow. A funeral was held for
him in Moscow on November 19 where thousands of workers came to pay
their respects. Trotsky gave the eulogy, which was his last public speech on
Soviet soil.
The Fifteenth Party Congress in December acted as a final epilogue to
the opposition’s struggle. In a moment of triumph, Stalin had oppositionists
purged en masse from the party. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other leaders were
sent into distant internal exile. Even though Stalin had emerged victorious,
228 Chapter Six
the question still remained: had Thermidor finally defeated the Russian
Revolution?
D. CHRISTIAN RAKOVSKY
Despite their political defeat, the Oppositionists stayed active. In their ranks
were many of the finest theoreticians and writers of the Bolshevik Party,
who now turned to the pen during this period of involuntary idleness. A
lively correspondence ensured that these exiles were not alone and were able
to exchange ideas with their fellow comrades. One topic above all domi-
nated their discussions: the Thermidorian degeneration of the Soviet Union.
At the heart of this debate was the former Soviet ambassador to France,
Christian Rakovsky.
Like Trotsky, Rakovsky was immersed in the history of the French
Revolution. Among his most prized possessions was a signed copy of
François Victor Alphonse Aulard’s Histoire politique de la Révolution
française. This interest was not antiquarian since Rakovsky believed that
1789 held contemporary relevance: “We should remember these histori-
cal examples [of the French Revolution] well. For us, they possess a living
modernity.”79 Unsurprisingly, Rakovsky turned to the French Revolution to
explain the Russian Revolution’s fate.
In “The Professional Dangers of Power,” Rakovsky argued that the Third
Estate was composed of diverse classes, who were united in their opposition
to the ancien régime. However, victory over the Bourbons meant that the for-
mer cohesion of the Third Estate disintegrated. Some members of the bour-
geoisie now assumed political and administrative positions in the new state.
Over the course of the revolution, power was increasingly concentrated into
fewer and fewer hands. Ultimately, the Jacobins found themselves divorced
from the sansculottes and did not trust them to exercise power. Robespierre
ended up liquidating groups on the left such as the Enragés and Hébertistes.
Rakovsky concluded that by sapping popular initiative, Robespierre paved
the way for Thermidor: “Thus the Robespierre régime, instead of developing
the revolutionary activities of the masses, already oppressed by the economic
crisis and even more by the shortage of food, aggravated the situation and
facilitated the work of the anti-democratic forces.”80
Rakovsky argued that a similar process happened in the Russian Revolution.
The workers had conquered power in 1917, but only a section of it was pre-
pared to rule. This section filled the administration of the party, state, and
the Red Army. This new bureaucracy ended up becoming separated from
the great mass of the proletariat. This led Rakovsky to a general conclusion
that the danger of bureaucratization existed in every proletarian revolution,
even in an advanced country, due to the differentiated nature of the working

class itself:
When a class takes power, one of its parts becomes the agent of that power. Thus
arises bureaucracy. In a socialist state, where capitalist accumulation is forbid-
den by members of the directing party, this differentiation begins as a functional
one; it later becomes a social one. I am thinking here of the social position of a
communist who has at his disposal a car, a nice apartment, regular holidays, and
receiving the maximum salary authorized by the party; a position which differs
from that of the communist working in the coal mines and receiving a salary of
fifty or sixty rubles per month. As regards workers and employees, you know
that they are divided into eighteen different categories.81
Rakovsky’s analysis left him pessimistic about the future of the opposition.
He claimed that the working class was too corrupted by the bureaucracy to
act as an agent of change. Now he believed that only the bureaucracy held
any political initiative in Soviet society. As Deutscher observed, Rakovsky’s
conclusion was that the opposition “could only hope to work for the future
mainly in the field of ideas” away from the centers of power.82 This was a
program of political paralysis.
Trotsky differed from Rakovsky on several points. He argued that
bureaucratization was mainly due to economic backwardness, the weak
social weight of the proletariat, and capitalist encirclement as opposed to a
more universal law. Nor did Trotsky share Rakovsky’s political hopeless-
ness. Despite these differences, Trotsky found Rakovsky’s analysis to be
unequaled. In The Revolution Betrayed, he wrote the following: “Christian
Rakovsky . . . [wrote] a brief inquiry into the Soviet bureaucracy, which we
have quoted above several times, for it still remains the best that has been
written on this subject.”83 In the end, Trotsky incorporated large portions of
Rakovsky’s analysis of bureaucratization into his mature theory of Stalinism.
E. THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED
The question of whether or not the Soviet Thermidor had come to pass con-
fronted the exiled oppositionists when Stalin launched his “left turn” in 1928–
1929. After years of defending the NEP, Stalin broke with Bukharin and
launched the Five-Year Plan to industrialize and create a planned economy.
Moreover, Stalin violently turned against the kulaks by collectivizing agricul-
ture. After being slandered as “super industrializers” by Stalin, this appeared
to be a tacit vindication of the Opposition’s program. Perhaps, socialism still
remained alive in the USSR?
230 Chapter Six
At first most of the exiles stayed true to their program, but by the end of
1929, the majority had capitulated to Stalin. From a total of eight thousand,
they were reduced to less than a thousand with Trotsky and Rakovsky as the
only prominent members who remained unbowed. Trotsky was contemptuous
of these capitulations, stating: “Some of the isolated and weaker elements do
not withstand this pressure. But the majority of the capitulations are obvi-
ously simulated. Broken and exhausted, they sign what they do not believe.”84
No doubt, Trotsky considered these capitulators to be like the former Jacobins
who cynically made their peace with the Thermidorian Directory.
Trotsky did not agree with the capitulators that Stalin was adopting the
opposition’s program. He considered Stalin to be a centrist, who vacillated
between left and right-wings of the party: “Predominance in the party, and
therefore in the country too, is in the hands of the Stalin faction, which has
all the features of centrism-moreover, centrism in a period of retrogression,
not upsurge. That means slight zigzags to the left, and deep zigzags to the
right.”85 For Trotsky, the main danger of Thermidor remained with Bukharin
and the forces on the party’s right. It was the kulak’s grain strike that created
a national emergency which caused Stalin to break with Bukharin. Trotsky
believed that pressure from the left caused Stalin to move against Bukharin
and the kulaks: “Stalin found himself driven, simultaneously with the crush-
ing of the Left Opposition, to plagiarize partially from its program in all
fields, to direct his fire to the Right.”86
Ultimately, Stalin’s “left turn” did not cause Trotsky to abandon his use of
Thermidor. As he told the Italian Left Communists, he found historical analo-
gies to be a useful analytical tool:
To judge the correctness or erroneousness of a historical analogy it is neces-

sary to clearly define its content and its limits. Not to resort to analogies with
the revolutions of the past epochs would mean simply to reject the historical
experience of mankind. The present day is always different from the day that
has passed. Yet it is impossible to learn from yesterday in any other way except
by the method of analogy.87
In debates with Hugo Urbahns of the German-based Leninbund in 1929,

Trotsky offered his own definition of Thermidor: “It indicates the direct trans-
fer of power into the hands of a different class, after which the revolutionary
class cannot regain power except through an armed uprising.”88 However,
Trotsky argued that the analogy did not mean an identity of phases in the
two revolutions. For example, he did not consider his own defeat to be the
equivalent to the guillotining of Robespierre: “Urbahns says: The crushing of
the Opposition and the deportation of Trotsky is equivalent to the guillotin-
ing of Robespierre’s group. The broad historical analogy is superseded here
by an arbitrary and cheap comparison of a personal and episodic character.”89

Focusing on the tragic fate of revolutionaries was to miss the deeper social
processes that Trotsky considered essential to understanding Thermidor.
Trotsky believed it was necessary to refine the Thermidor analogy by
taking into account the class differences between the revolutions in France
and Russia. He noted that the Russian Revolution was far vaster in its social
transformation than the French Revolution:
The Russian Revolution of the Twentieth Century is incomparably broader and

deeper than the French Revolution of the Eighteenth Century. The revolution-
ary class on which the October Revolution rests is far bigger numerically, far
more homogeneous, compact and resolute than the urban plebeians of France.
The leadership of the October Revolution in all its tendencies is far more expe-
rienced and perspicacious than the leading groups of the French Revolution
were or could be. Finally, the political, economic, social and cultural changes
accomplished by the Bolshevik dictatorship are far more deep-going than the
changes accomplished by the Jacobins.90
Furthermore, the differences between the two revolutions extended to their

degeneration. In France, the Jacobins and sansculottes had been violently
overthrown. In Russia, Trotsky argued that while the Communist Party had
degenerated, it remained in power, and the institutions of the proletarian
state were still intact: “The means of production, once the property of the
capitalists, remain to this very day in the hands of the Soviet state. The land
is nationalized. The exploiting elements are still excluded from the soviets
and from the army. The monopoly of foreign trade remains a bulwark against
the economic intervention of capitalism. All these are not trifles.”91 Trotsky
argued that while the Soviet bureaucracy was a parasitic growth on the Soviet
state, it had not become a new exploiting class.
If the Opposition’s defeat meant Thermidor, then this had happened peace-
fully without a civil war. Trotsky said this was ludicrous since it turned
Thermidor into an argument for reverse reformism: “how then can any one
assume or believe that power can pass from the hands of the Russian prole-
tariat into the hands of the bourgeoisie in a peaceful, tranquil, imperceptible,
bureaucratic manner? Such a conception of Thermidor is nothing else but
inverted reformism.”92 For now, Trotsky said that no genuine counterrevolu-
tion had occurred in the USSR since there was no violent overturn.
Yet Trotsky believed that the danger of Thermidor and Bonapartism
remained in the Soviet Union. He speculated on the possible agents who
could carry it out. Trotsky viewed Stalin as a centrist “arbiter” between dif-
ferent classes. However, he did not consider Stalin to be a conscious agent of
counterrevolution, but only a “preparation for Bonapartism.”93 At other times,
232 Chapter Six
Trotsky wondered if the Red Army would step in and take power away from
the party. As he concluded: “There will be no shortage of Bonapartes.”94
Trotsky speculated that in the case of the USSR the historical analogy
would break down and the stages of Thermidor and Bonapartism would
merge together. He found this plausible since the analogies were not simply
abstract concepts, but were being used to analyze processes in motion:
In this analysis of the processes of Thermidorean degeneration in the party, the

Opposition was far from saying that the counterrevolutionary overturn, were it
to occur, would necessarily have to assume the form of Thermidor, that is, of a
more or less lasting domination by the bourgeoisified Bolsheviks with the for-
mal retention of the Soviet system, similar to the retention of the Convention by
the Thermidoreans. History never repeats itself, particularly when there is such
a profound difference in the class base.95
Understanding the dynamics of a living phenomenon such as Stalinism meant

that Marxists could not subjectively and mechanically apply Thermidor, but
must use it as a tool to reveal the USSR’s real laws of motion.
In the early part of his exile, Trotsky’s understanding of the Soviet
Thermidor remained open. He viewed it as an event which had not yet
occurred. As a result, the strategic line of the Opposition remained one of
reform not revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky changed his mind in 1933 after
Hitler took power in Germany. He blamed the Communist International’s
Third Period line of “social fascism” for facilitating the triumph of Nazism.
The destruction of the world’s largest Communist Party outside of the USSR
without a struggle caused him to conclude that the Comintern was politically
bankrupt. For Trotsky, the defeat in Germany was a historical test comparable
to the failure of the Second International in 1914. Now Trotsky said it was
necessary for revolutionaries to create a new international: “Only the creation
of the Marxist International, completely independent of the Stalinist bureau-
cracy and counterposed politically to it, can save the USSR from collapse by
binding its destiny with the destiny of the world proletarian revolution.”96 In
addition, Trotsky abandoned his hopes of reforming the Soviet Communist
Party. He announced that the Opposition would need to form a second party
and overthrow Stalin: “To speak now of the ‘reform’ of the CPSU would
mean to look backward and not forward, to soothe one’s mind with empty
formulas. In the USSR, it is necessary to build a Bolshevik party again.”97 In
breaking completely with the possibility of reform, it appeared that Trotsky
was now playing the role of the Soviet Babeuf.
His conclusions that the USSR and the Comintern were now unreformable
led Trotsky to revise his views on Thermidor. Trotsky’s new understand-
ing was formalized in the 1935 essay “The Workers’ State, Thermidor and
Bonapartism.” In what could be considered a self-criticism of his earlier

views, Trotsky said: “Nevertheless, today we can and must admit that the
analogy of Thermidor served to becloud rather than to clarify the question.”98
Trotsky argued that the French Thermidor was not a counterrevolution in
the social sense since it had not gone from capitalism back to feudalism. In
France, the basic conquests of the bourgeois revolution remained secure.
What Thermidor did represent was a shift from Jacobin radicals to the more
affluent and conservative sectors of the bourgeoisie: “The overturn of the
Ninth Thermidor did not liquidate the basic conquests of the bourgeois
revolution, but it did transfer the power into the hands of the more moderate
and conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of bourgeois society.”99
Trotsky concluded that the French Thermidor was a political reversal, but not
a social or economic one.
Following this analogy, Trotsky said that the Soviet Thermidor had already
begun with the political defeat of the Left Opposition:
Socially the proletariat is more homogeneous than the bourgeoisie, but it con-
tains within itself an entire series of strata that become manifest with excep-
tional clarity following the conquest of power, during the period when the
bureaucracy and a workers’ aristocracy connected with it begin to take form.
The smashing of the Left Opposition implied in the most direct and immediate
sense the transfer of power from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard into
the hands of the more conservative elements among the bureaucracy and the
upper crust of the working class. The year 1924—that was the beginning of the
Soviet Thermidor.100
For Trotsky, not only had the Soviet Thermidor already come to pass, but the
country was now under Bonapartist rule. He said that Stalin was analogous
to Napoleon since he consolidated the revolution against forces both on the
left and right:
Carrying the policies of Thermidor further, Napoleon waged a struggle not only
against the feudal world but also against the “rabble” and the democratic circles
of the petty and middle bourgeoisie; in this way he concentrated the fruits of
the regime born out of the revolution in the hands of the new bourgeois aris-
tocracy. Stalin guards the conquests of the October Revolution not only against
the feudal-bourgeois counterrevolution but also against the claims of the toilers,
their impatience and their dissatisfaction; he crushes the left wing that expresses
the ordered historical and progressive tendencies of the unprivileged working
masses; he creates a new aristocracy by means of an extreme differentiation
in wages, privileges, ranks, etc. Leaning for support upon the topmost layer
of the new social hierarchy against the lowest—sometimes vice versa—Stalin
has attained the complete concentration of power in his own hands. What else
should this regime be called if not Soviet Bonapartism?101
234 Chapter Six
While Stalin defended the revolution’s gains against imperialism, Trotsky

said that he represented the interests of the bureaucracy that had usurped
political power from the working class. Yet Soviet Bonapartism was an inher-
ently unstable form of rule, since it balanced itself between different classes.
Its continued existence meant that the gains of October were endangered.
To save socialism, Trotsky said that the working class must overthrow the
bureaucracy.
In the following year, Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR and Stalinism was
fleshed out in The Revolution Betrayed. Contrary to the declarations of Stalin,
Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union while a workers’ state was not actually
a socialist society. In line with Marxist orthodoxy, Trotsky said that socialism
required abundance, not the situation of want, inequality, and poverty that
prevailed in the USSR. Trotsky concluded that Russia was neither socialist
nor capitalist, but a society in transition between the two: “It would be truer,
therefore, to name the present Soviet regime in all its contradictoriness, not
a socialist regime, but a preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to
socialism.”102
Trotsky argued that the transitional nature of the Soviet Union was due to
the material situation of backwardness, isolation, and scarcity. These condi-
tions were only exacerbated by the revolution and civil war that left Russia
utterly devastated: “The collapse of the productive forces surpassed anything
of the kind that history had ever seen. The country, and the government with
it, were at the very edge of the abyss.”103 During the civil war, the bulk of the
working class was reduced to impotence while many of its most active mem-
bers were absorbed into the Red Army and the party-state bureaucracy. While
the revolution succeeded, it was alone without any immediate hope of rescue
from the international proletariat. Trotsky said that these material conditions
nurtured the growth of the bureaucracy:
The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consump-

tion, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods
in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little
goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very
long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting
point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It “knows” who is to get some-
thing and who has to wait.104
It is interesting to note that in The Revolution Betrayed that Trotsky accepted

Rakovsky’s argument about the inherent dangers of bureaucratization in a
socialist revolution. He observed that even a socialist United States would
not immediately be able to introduce a society of abundance: “A socialist
state even in America, on the basis of the most advanced capitalism, could
not immediately provide everyone with as much as he needs, and would

therefore be compelled to spur everyone to produce as much as possible”105
While Trotsky agrees with Rakovsky that the prospect of Thermidor exists in
every socialist revolution, he says that its possibility was more pronounced in
underdeveloped countries:
The tendencies of bureaucratism, which strangles the workers’ movement in

capitalist countries, would everywhere show themselves even after a proletarian
revolution. But it is perfectly obvious that the poorer the society which issues
from a revolution, the sterner and more naked would be the expression of this
“law,” the more crude would be the forms assumed by bureaucratism, and the
more dangerous would it become for socialist development.106
While the possibility of Thermidor may be ever-present in socialism, Trotsky

concluded that different material circumstances determined the chances of its
likelihood.
Under the conditions of scarcity, it was impossible for the Soviet state to
simply “wither away.” Instead, the state grew stronger in order to protect the
privileges of the bureaucracy from the workers and peasants. However, the
bureaucracy’s position as the guardian of state property meant it played a
contradictory role in the USSR. On the one hand, it protected and expanded
state property with the Five-Year Plan. On the other hand, the bureaucracy
fostered material and social inequality. Due to this contradiction, the socialist
elements in Soviet society declined while bourgeois elements gained ground.
While deploring the growth of inequality, Trotsky readily acknowledged
that the bureaucracy’s efforts in industrialization were very impressive:
Gigantic achievement in industry, enormously promising beginnings in agricul-

ture, an extraordinary growth of the old industrial cities and a building of new
ones, a rapid increase of the numbers of workers, a rise in cultural level and
cultural demands—such are the indubitable results of the October revolution,
in which the prophets of the old world tried to see the grave of human civiliza-
tion. With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over.
Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital,
but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface—not in
the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity.107
Since the bureaucracy did not want to endanger its privileges by supporting
revolutions abroad, they had to revise the Bolshevik internationalist pro-
gram with the ideology of socialism in one country. According to Trotsky:
“The ‘theory’ of socialism in one country, first announced in the autumn of
1924, already signalized an effort to liberate Soviet foreign policy from the
program of international revolution.”108 In practice, socialism in one country
236 Chapter Six
meant that the interests of the USSR took precedence over those of the world
revolution. As a result, the Comintern was transformed into an instrument of
Soviet foreign policy: “At the present time, the Communist International is a
completely submissive apparatus in the service of Soviet foreign policy, ready
at any time for any zigzag whatever.”109 The Comintern’s shifts wavered
between the left sectarianism of the Third Period and the right opportunism of
the popular front. In both cases, the result was disaster for the working class.
Ultimately, Trotsky argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy acted as a roadblock
to the world revolution.
Yet no matter how willing Stalin was to curtail revolutions in Spain or
China, this would not satisfy the imperialist powers. They considered the
Soviet Union to be an existential threat to capitalism since it rested on differ-
ent property relations. In an analogy to France, Trotsky noted that monarchist
Europe feared Napoleon not because he was an emperor but because he
defended bourgeois property:
The evolution of the Soviet bureaucracy is of interest to the world bourgeoisie

in the last analysis from the point of view of possible changes in the forms of
property. Napoleon I, after radically abandoning the traditions of Jacobinism,
donning the crown, and restoring the Catholic cult, remained nevertheless an
object of hatred to the whole of ruling semi-feudal Europe, because he con-
tinued to defend the new property system created by the revolution. Until the
monopoly of foreign trade is broken and the rights of capital restored, the Soviet
Union, in spite of all the services of its ruling stratum, remains in the eyes of the
bourgeoisie of the whole world an irreconcilable enemy, and German National
Socialism a friend, if not today, at least of tomorrow.110
No matter what concessions he made, the bourgeoisie would always see

Stalin as a fire-breathing Proletarian Jacobin.
Trotsky concluded that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a parasitic caste, not
a new exploiting class. The bureaucracy lacked traits found in other ruling
classes. For instance, it did not own the means of production and could not
pass them down to their children:
The attempt to represent the Soviet bureaucracy as a class of “state capitalists”

will obviously not withstand criticism. The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor
bonds. It is recruited, supplemented and renewed in the manner of an adminis-
trative hierarchy, independently of any special property relations of its own. The
individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of
the state apparatus. The bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the form of an
abuse of power. It conceals its income; it pretends that as a special social group
it does not even exist. Its appropriation of a vast share of the national income
has the character of social parasitism.111
However, Trotsky said that the Soviet bureaucracy, like other Bonapartist
states, was a regime of crisis. Stalinism defended its claims to state property
against restorationist sections in the bureaucracy, resulting in periodic purges
to prevent the crystallization of a new class. The bureaucracy also curtailed
soviet democracy, which would lead to a full counterrevolution unless the
working class intervened: “Bonapartism is one of the political weapons of the
capitalist regime in its critical period. Stalinism is a variety of the same sys-
tem, but upon the basis of a workers’ state torn by the antagonism between an
organized and armed Soviet aristocracy and the unarmed toiling masses.”112
In order to solidify itself into a ruling class, the bureaucracy must expropriate
the proletariat not just politically, but economically by converting national
property into private property. Trotsky warned that if the bureaucracy was
successful, then this would mean the restoration of capitalism:
But the very fact of its appropriation of political power in a country where
the principal means of production are in the hands of the state, creates a new
and hitherto unknown relation between the bureaucracy and the riches of the
nation. The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak,
“belongs” to the bureaucracy. If these as yet wholly new relations should
solidify, become the norm and be legalized, whether with or without resistance
from the workers, they would, in the long run, lead to a complete liquidation of
the social conquests of the proletarian revolution.113
While the bureaucracy had usurped the revolution, they had not yet over-
thrown it. For Trotsky, the restoration of capitalism was not a foregone con-
clusion since the future depended on a clash between different social forces.
The Soviet proletariat could step onto the stage of history once again and
overthrow the bureaucracy. Yet Trotsky said that a future revolution in the
USSR would not be a social one, but a political one since the workers would
not denationalize industry or dismantle the planned economy: “The overthrow
of the Bonapartist caste will, of course, have deep social consequences, but in
itself it will be confined within the limits of political revolution.”114 Trotsky
envisioned that this political revolution would bring sweeping changes by
restoring soviet democracy, internationalism, and egalitarianism.
In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky focused more on the social dynam-
ics of the USSR without looking too closely at Stalin himself as a historical
actor. Later in his unfinished Stalin, Trotsky took the opportunity to examine
the life of the general secretary. He observed that Stalin’s rise to the center
of power in the Soviet Union was quite exceptional since he was a medi-
ocrity compared to other major figures in the Bolshevik Party. During the
prerevolutionary era, Stalin was a loyal committeeman in the underground
party who was instinctively afraid of mass struggle: “Lack of confidence
238 Chapter Six
in the masses, as well as in individuals, is the basis of his nature.”115 While

Stalin was not a natural revolutionary or leader, Trotsky noted that he was
well suited to play the part of a bureaucratic administrator.
For Stalin to play the role of a Soviet Bonaparte required the emergence
of an unprecedented situation. Trotsky said this moment appeared in the
aftermath of the civil war as the bureaucracy became the leading force in
soviet life: “When the masses abandon the field of public life and return to
their living quarters, retreating, confused, frustrated and exhausted, into the
four walls of their homes, then a vacuum is created. This vacuum is filled by
a new bureaucracy.”116 The historical conditions that prevailed in the USSR
meant someone with a limited vision was needed. Material circumstances
determined that Stalin would play this part. As Trotsky observed: “Helvétius
once said that every epoch in society requires its own great persons, but when
it does not find any, it invents them.”117 It took time for Stalin to grow into a
dictator because he was unaware of the historical role he was carrying out.
Due to Stalin’s lack of historical foresight, he genuinely believed that he was
serving the interests of the revolution. Thus, it was easy for Stalin to dismiss
all charges of Thermidor from Trotsky and the Left Opposition. So narrow
was Stalin’s perspective that Trotsky believed the general secretary would
have recoiled in horror upon seeing his own future:
If at that time anyone would have shown Stalin his own future role he would
have turned away from himself in disgust. . . . If Stalin could have foreseen at
the very beginning where his fight against Trotskyism would lead, he undoubt-
edly would have stopped short, in spite of the prospect of victory over all his
opponents. But he did not foresee anything. . . . The absence of a creative
imagination, the inability to generalise and to foresee, killed the revolutionist in
Stalin when he took over the helm on his own. But the very same traits, backed
by his authority as a former revolutionist, enabled him to camouflage the rise of
the Thermidorian bureaucracy.118
In contrast to Koestler’s Rubashov, who saw “Number One” as representing

the all-knowing force of historical necessity, Trotsky viewed the general sec-
retary as the unwitting and ruthless agent of Thermidorian betrayal.
Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism broke sharply with the Cold War counter-
Enlightenment, the Moscow-line Communists, and other Western Marxists
who all accepted the revolutionary disguise of Stalinism while ignoring its
Thermidorian content. Superficially, it could be observed that Stalinists were
Marxists due to their slogans and party membership. However, Trotsky noted
that the material content of those slogans and the actions of the Soviet Party
represented a break with communism. As Trotsky observed about the purges:
The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody
line but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of the entire old generation of
Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle generation, which participated in
the civil war, and that part of the youth which took seriously the Bolshevik
traditions, shows not only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility
between Bolshevism and Stalinism. How can this be ignored?119
However, Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism was not without its flaws. The
greatest weakness was that Trotsky underestimated the bureaucracy’s staying
power. He expected that the Soviet Union would either be defeated in World
War II or that the bureaucracy would be overthrown when the revolution
spread to the West.120 Trotsky did not consider a third option that Stalinism
would emerge from the war victorious and strengthened. In a negative sense,
Trotsky’s analysis was proved correct. He predicted that unless the working
class led a political revolution against Stalinism, then capitalism would be
restored. The bureaucracy ended up doing such a thorough job of atomizing
the Soviet working class that they were unable to resist the final counterrevo-
lution under Gorbachev and Yeltsin in 1991.
Trotsky concluded that the Soviet Thermidor was not a simple repetition of
the French one. Using a historical materialist analysis, Trotsky explained that
Stalinism emerged from the defeat of the world revolution and isolation of the
USSR. While Stalinism was a political counter-revolution that usurped the
rule of the working class, it was not a social counterrevolution that restored
capitalism. This outcome could only be averted if the working class over-
threw the bureaucracy and reestablished soviet democracy.
Trotsky’s Proletarian Jacobin approach stayed clear of the pitfalls of
Stalinism and the counter-Enlightenment. Unlike the Stalinists, Trotsky
refused to apologize for the bureaucracy’s crimes as the fulfillment of histori-
cal necessity. Nor did he offer any comfort to anti-communists since Trotsky
did not view the USSR as a frozen totalitarian society. He recognized that
it remained anti-capitalist and that the working class had a historical duty
to defend the Soviet Union from imperialism. In the end, Trotsky offered a
powerful Marxist analysis against the Dialectics of Saturn. It still serves as
a basis for understanding Stalinism today and central to any future renewal
of Marxism.
NOTES
1. As Pierre Broué notes, Trotsky was well-read on the French Revolution:

240 Chapter Six
Trotsky did not devote any of his works specifically to the French Revolution,
which is a pity. However, he did study it closely. He knew the works of Alphonse
Aulard, including his collection, Documents for the history of the Jacobin
Society. He knew Michelet’s History of France and Jean Jaurès’sSocialist
History, for which he owed to a special admiration. Throughout the vicissitudes
of his political life he did not cease to keep abreast of the latest scientific work
in the field. He knew the work of Mathiez and appreciated its importance. He
made use of the first of the works of Georges Lefebvre to reach the wider public.
Pierre Broué, “Trotsky and the French Revolution,” Cahiers Leon Trotsky 30 (June
1987). https://www.marxists.org/archive/broue/1987/Trotsky%20and%20French
%20Revolution.pdf.
2. “Engels to Vera Zasulich - 23 April 1885,” in MECW, vol. 47, 280.
3. Georgi Plekhanov, “Speech at the International Workers’ Socialist Congress in
Paris, July 1889,” in Plekhanov: Selected Philosophical Works, Volume I (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1961), 454. On the concept of hegemony in Russian Marxism,
See Anderson 2020, 61–62. On Plekhanov’s Jacobinism, see Samuel H. Baron, Ple-
khanov: The Father of Russian Marxism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1963), 213–14; Robert Mayer, “Lenin and the Jacobin Identity in Russia,” Studies
in East European Thought 51, no. 2 (June 1999): 140. See also Doug Enaa Greene,
“Georgi Plekhanov: Tragedy of a forerunner,” LINKS International Journal of Social-
ist Renewal. July 28, 2016. http://links.org.au/node/4773.
4. Quoted in Tony Cliff, Building the Party: Lenin 1893–1914 (Chicago: Haymar-
ket Books, 2002), 91.
5. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, trans. Alan
Woods (London: Wellred Books, 2016), 784.
6. Baron 1963, 246.
7. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1966), 53 After the 1903 Congress, Martov bitterly referred to Lenin as “Robespi-
erre.” See Israel Getzler, Martov: A Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Lon-
don: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 88.
8. Quoted in Pipes 1990, 348.
9. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Question of Russian Social Democracy,”
in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1970), 118.
10. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (London: New Park Publications, 1979a), 77.
11. “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” in LCW, vol. 7, 381.
12. According to Victor Serge: “Lenin’s ‘proletarian Jacobinism,’ with its dis-
interestedness, its discipline in both thought and action, was grafted upon the psy-
chology of cadres whose character had been formed under the old regime—that is
to say, in the course of the struggle against despotism.” Serge 2012, 156. See also
Souvarine 1939, 121–22 on the oscillations in Lenin between Jacobinism and Ger-
man Social-Democracy. For more on Proletarian Jacobinism from Marx to Lenin,
see Joseph Seymour’s series on “Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradi-
tion,” Young Spartacist. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/youngspart
-sl/indexhtm; Greene and Fluss, “The Jacobin Enlightenment.”; Greene, “Lessons

of the Commune.”
13. “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in LCW,
vol. 9, 58.
14. Ibid. In other discussions about tactics and the 1905 Revolution, Lenin called
Engels a “true Jacobin of Social-Democracy.” See “On the Provisional Revolutionary
Government,” in LCW, vol. 8, 478.
15. “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in LCW,
vol. 9, 60.
16. Alexander Parvus, “Our Tasks,” in Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The
Documentary Record, ed. Richard Day and Daniel Gaido (Boston: Brill, 2009), 488.
17. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1978a), 54.
18. “Can ‘Jacobinism’ Frighten the Working Class?” in LCW, vol. 25, 122.
19. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921 (New York: Verso,
2003a), 267.
20. Leon Trotsky, “What Next?” Marxists Internet Archive. https://wwwmarxists
.org/archive/trotsky/1917/next/ch05 htm.
21. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution Volume II: The Attempted
Counterrevolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937), 157.
22. Quoted in Dmitry Shlapentokh, The Counter-Revolution in Revolution: Images
of Thermidor and Napoleon at the Time of Russian Revolution and Civil War (Lon-
don: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 64.
23. Quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look
Back on the French Revolution (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 49.
24. Quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1981), 22.
25. Lennard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1976), 135–36. At the time, Victor Serge said: “The success of
a revolution requires the implacable severity of a Dzerzhinsky.” See Victor Serge,
Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921 (Chicago: Haymarket,
2011a), 102.
26. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (New York:
Verso, 2007), 59.
27. Leon Trotsky, “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger,” Marxists Internet Archive.
https://www marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch32.htm.
28. Quoted in Getzler 1967, 173.
29. Julius Martov, “Decomposition or Conquest of the State,” Marxists Internet
Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/1921/xx/decomp.htm.
30. “The Russian Revolution,” in Luxemburg 1970, 376 and 395.
31. Ibid., 393.
32. Ibid., 389.
33. Quoted in Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action (Chicago: Haymar-
ket, 2010), 239. Luise Kautsky was the wife of Karl Kautsky.
34. “The Russian Revolution,” in Luxemburg 1970, 394.
242 Chapter Six
35. In particular, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune 1917–1918: Class
and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1972).
36. William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921: Volume One
(London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1935), 371. Years later, Trotsky speculated
that if the Bolsheviks had not taken power, then fascism would have emerged in
Russia before Italy: “Had the Bolsheviks not seized power, the world would have
had a Russian name for Fascism five years before the March on Rome.” See Trotsky
2016, 599.
37. Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want? in The Rosa Lux-
emburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis & Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2004), 352.
38. Rosa Luxemburg, “Constituent Assembly or Council Government?” Rosa
Luxemburg Stiftung. https://www.rosalux.de/stiftung/historisches-zentrum/rosa
-luxemburg/constituent-assembly-or-council-government; For a brief overview of
Luxemburg’s evolving views on the Russian Revolution see Nathaniel Flakin, “Was
Rosa Luxemburg an Opponent of the Russian Revolution?” Left Voice, January
15, 2021. https://www.leftvoice.org/was-rosa-luxemburg-an-opponent-of-the-russian
-revolution/.
39. Quoted in Hobsbawm 1990, 45.
40. Albert Mathiez, “Bolshevism and Jacobinism,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:
//www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/mathiez/1920/bolshevism-jacobinism
.htm.
41. Quoted in Gerald H. Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914–1923
(Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1974), 423.
42. Antonio Gramsci, “The Russian Maximalists,” in Selections from Political
Writings (1910–1920) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), 32.
43. “Two Revolutions” in ibid., 309.
44. Gramsci 1971, 78.
45. Hannah Arendt also linked Machiavelli to the French Revolution:
[Machiavelli] certainly was not the father of political science or political theory,
but it is difficult to deny that one may well see in him the spiritual father of
revolution. Not only do we find in him already this conscious, passionate effort
to revive the spirit and the institutions of Roman antiquity which then became
so characteristic of eighteenth-century political thought; even more important
in this context is his famous insistence on the role of violence in the realm of
politics which has never ceased to shock his readers, but which we also find in
the words and deeds of the men of the French Revolution.
See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 37.

46. Leon Trotsky, “The Danger of Thermidor,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932–
1933] (New York: Pathfinder 1972b), 76–77.
47. Serge 2012, 152. Serge on Kronstadt is discussed later.
48. Quoted in Souvarine 1939, 317.
49. For Stalin and the Georgian Affair see Lewin 2005, 43–64.
50. “Letters to the Congress,” in LCW 36, 596. For more on Lenin’s last struggle
against Stalin, see Lewin 2005a.
51. “Better Fewer, But Better,” in LCW 33, 487.
52. “On Co-operation,” in LCW 33, 474.
53. Ibid., 500. See also Lewin 2005a, 109–10.
54. “The Possibility of Building Socialism in our Country,” in Stalin Collected
Works, Vol. 8 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1953), 101–3. (hence-
forth SCW)
55. Ernest Mandel, “Trotsky’s Marxism: A Rejoinder,” New Left Review 56
(July–August 1969): 78. For additional background on Trotsky’s program, see Ernest
Mandel, Trotsky As Alternative (New York: Verso, 1995), 59–66; Ernest Mandel,
“Trotsky’s Marxism: an Anti-Critique,” New Left Review 47 (January–February
1968): 32–51; Vadim Z. Rogovin, Was There an Alternative? 1923–1927 Trotsky-
ism: A Look Back Through the Years (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2021); Deutscher
2003b; Kunal Chattopadhyay, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky (Kolkata: Progress
Publishers, 2006); Doug Enaa Greene, “The Chimes at Midnight: Trotskyism in the
USSR 1926–1938,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, October 13,
2017. http://links.org.au/chimes-at-midnight-trotskyism-ussr-1926–1938; Doug Enaa
Greene, “Leon Trotsky and Cultural Revolution,” Cosmonaut, May 12, 2019. https://
cosmonaut.blog/2019/05/12/leon-trotsky-and-cultural-revolution/.
56. Leon Trotsky, “The New Course in the Soviet Economy,” in Writings of Leon
Trotsky [1930] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975b), 115.
57. Leon Trotsky, “Habit and Custom,” in Problems of Everyday Life (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1973b), 30.
58. In particular see “The Platform of the Opposition: The Party Crisis and How
to Overcome It,” in The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926–27) (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1980), 440–41.Trotsky’s views on bureaucracy in the CPSU and his
proposals on restoring inner-party democracy during this period are covered well by
Paul Le Blanc, Leon Trotsky and the Organizational Principles of the Revolutionary
Party, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 26–40.
59. Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1970b), 270.
60. For some background on the inadequacies of Bukharin, see my “Bukharin:
The Favorite of the Whole Party,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal,
February 13, 2015. http://links.org.au/node/4291.
61. Richard B. Day, “Leon Trotsky on the problems of the smychka and forced
collectivization,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 13, no. 1 (1982): 59–60.
Richard Day has postulated that if Trotsky’s proposals had been implemented as early
as 1925–1926, then “the final collapse of the smychka and forced collectivization
might not have occurred. There can be little doubt that the principal error of the party
leadership was to commit excessive resources to heavy industry during the period
of goods famine.” See Richard B. Day, Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic
Isolation (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1973), 65. However, the policy
244 Chapter Six
of import-dependency would have run into difficulties with the onset of the Great
Depression when the conditions of trade turned against the USSR.
62. “The Platform of the Opposition: The Party Crisis and How to Overcome It,”
in Trotsky 1980, 418.
63. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The New Economics (London, Oxford University
Press, 1965), 88.
64. “Speech to the Fifteenth Conference,” in Trotsky 1980, 201.
65. Alfred Rosmer, Moscow Under Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1971), 207.
66. Leon Trotsky, “How Did Stalin Defeat the Opposition?” in Writings of Leon
Trotsky [1935–1936] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), 176. In his autobiography,
Trotsky said that the ruling triumvirate came to believe their own invented fantasies
that he was a potential Bonaparte:
Next to the traditions of the October revolution, the epigones feared most the
traditions of the civil war and my connection with the army. I yielded up the
military post without a fight, with even a sense of relief, since I was thereby
wresting from my opponents’ hands their weapon of insinuation concerning my
military intentions. The epigones had first invented these fantasies to justify
their acts, and then began almost to believe them.
See Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at Biography (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1970a), 518.
67. “Thermidor,” in Trotsky 1980, 332 and 336.
68. See E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country 1924–1926 Volume II (London:
Macmillan, 1959), 112–14. See also Jay Bergman, The French Revolutionary Tradi-
tion in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019), 255–59; Robert V Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution:
Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1960), 255–56. For background on Zinoviev, see Lars T. Lih, “Zinoviev: The populist
Leninist,” in Martov and Zinoviev: Head to Head at Halle, ed. Ben Lewis and Lars
T. Lih (London: November Publications, 2011), 39–59. Zalutskii himself was later
arrested during the purges and executed in 1937.
69. Jay Bergman, “The Perils of Historical Analogy: Leon Trotsky on the French
Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 1 (January–March 1987): 83.
70. Quoted in Bergman 2019, 263.
71. Quoted in Deutscher 1966, 347.
72. “With Reference to the Opposition’s ‘Declaration’ of August 8, 1927,” in SCW,
vol. 10, 93.
73. “The Clemenceau thesis and the party regime,” in Trotsky 1980, 511–12.
74. “The Fifteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), December 2–19, 1927,” in SCW,
vol. 10, 351–52. For more context on the war danger and the Clemenceau Thesis, see
Daniels 1960, 285–87.
75. The jeunesse dorée or gilded youth were affluent young men who physi-
cally attacked Jacobins after the Thermidor. According to Ian Birchall, they were
precursors to later right-wing paramilitary squads: “It would be anachronistic to

describe the jeunesse dorée as fascists, but in some ways they do prefigure the fascist
street-gangs of the twentieth century.” Ian Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (London:
Palgrave, 1997), 48.
76.“Three Letters to Bukharin,” in Trotsky 1980, 55.
77. Quoted in Birchall 1997, 107.
78. Adolf Joffe, “Letter to Leon Trotsky,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www
.marxists.org/archive/joffe/1927/letter.htm Emphasis is Joffe’s.
79. Christian Rakovsky, “A New Era of Soviet Development,” in Christian
Rakovsky: Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR 1923–1930, ed. Gus Fagan
(London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 102.
80. “The Professional Dangers of Power,” in Rakovsky 1980, 128.
81. Ibid., 125–26.
82. Deutscher 2003c, 368. Rakovsky was one of the last members of the Opposition
to capitulate to Stalin, doing so in 1934. This cut Trotsky off from any remaining sup-
porters in the Soviet Union. Rakovsky’s return to grace was short-lived though. After
serving as Soviet ambassador to Japan, he was arrested again in 1937 and was one of
the defendants in the last purge trial of March 1938. Unlike most of his codefendants,
Rakovsky was not executed, but sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. He ended
up being summarily executed a few months after the German invasion of the USSR.
See Leon Trotsky, Trotsky’s Diary in Exile 1935 (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 53;
Leon Trotsky, “The Meaning of Rakovsky ‘s Surrender,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky
[1933–1934] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975b), 277.
83. Trotsky 1972a, 101. See also Thomas M. Twiss, Trotsky and the Problem of
Soviet Bureaucracy (Boston: Brill, 2014), 238–43.
84. “Open Letter to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: The State of the
Party and the Tasks of the Left Opposition,” Trotsky 1975b, 146.
85. “At a New Stage” in Trotsky 1980, 629.
86. “Defense of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition” in Writings of Leon
Trotsky [1929] (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1975a), 280. For the reasons Trotsky
did not ally with Bukharin at the end of the 1920s, see Vadim Z. Rogovin, Bolsheviks
Against Stalinism 1928–1933: Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition (Oak Park: Meh-
ring Books, 2019), 79 and 89–90.
87. “Letter to the Italian Left Communists,” in Trotsky 1975a, 322.
88. “Defense of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition” in Trotsky 1975a, 279.
89. Ibid., 283.
90. Ibid., 283–84.
91. Ibid., 284.
92. Ibid.
93. “Toward Capitalism or Socialism?” in Trotsky 1975b, 206.
94. Leon Trotsky, “The Danger of Bonapartism,” in The Challenge of the Left
Opposition (1928–1929) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1981), 347.
95. Leon Trotsky, “Thermidor and Bonapartism,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky
[1930–1931] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973d), 91.
96. “It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties Anew,” in Trotsky 1972b, 310.
246 Chapter Six
97. “It Is Impossible to Remain in the Same ‘International’ with Stalin, Manuilsky,
Lozovsky and Company,” in Trotsky 1975b, 20.
98. Leon Trotsky, “The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism,” in Writings
of Leon Trotsky [1934–1935] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2002), 242.
99. Ibid. 249.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., 257–58.
102. Trotsky 1972a, 47.
103. Ibid., 22.
104. Ibid., 112.
105. Ibid., 53.
106. Ibid., 55.
107. Ibid., 8.
108. Ibid., 186. Stalin first formulated the idea of socialism in one country in
the autumn of 1924. In the first edition of his Foundations of Leninism, Stalin had
declared socialism in one country was impossible. This was revised in subsequent
editions. See Deutscher 1966, 281–83. However, Bukharin also deserves credit as the
coauthor of the theory of socialism in one country, advancing it first in April 1924.
See Cohen 1980, 184.
109. Trotsky 1972a, 186–87. In particular, see Leon Trotsky, Whither France?
(New York: Merit, 1968) and Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931–39) (New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1973c).
110. Trotsky 1972a, 197.
111. Ibid., 250.
112. Ibid., 278.
113. Ibid., 249.
114. Ibid., 288. For Trotsky’s program of political revolution, see ibid., 289–90. As
both Deutscher and Mandel note, this was similar to Trotsky’s earlier program in the
1920s, but now contained new demands for elections and multiparty Soviet democ-
racy. See Deutscher 2003c, 252 and Ernest Mandel, Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic
of His Thought (London: New Left Books, 1979), 124–26.
115. Trotsky 2016, 68. This work uses the most recent version of Trotsky’s Stalin
that removes politically dubious changes and insertions by the original editor and
incorporates previously unpublished material. For reviews of Trotsky’s Stalin, see
“Trotsky on Stalin,” in Deutscher 1969, 78–90; John G. Wright, “Trotsky’s Biography
of Stalin—The Meaning of the Attacks Upon It,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:
//www marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1946/05/stalbiog html; Max Shacht-
man, “Trotsky’s Stalin: A Critical Evaluation,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://
www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1946/10/trotsky-stalin html.
116. Trotsky 2016, 494.
117. Ibid., 606.
118. Ibid., 534 and 614. Trotsky’s characterization echoes that given by Khrush-
chev in the Secret Speech: “Stalin was convinced that [these things he did] were
necessary . . . He saw this from the position of the interest of the working class, of
the interest of the labouring people, of the interests of the victory of Socialism and
Communism. We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. . . . In
this lies the whole tragedy!” Nikita Khrushchev, “Speech to 20th Congress of the
C.P.S.U.,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www marxists.org/archive/khrushchev
/1956/02/24.htm.
119. Leon Trotsky, “Stalinism and Bolshevism,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky
[1936–1937] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978b), 423.
120. Trotsky 1972a, 227.
Chapter Seven
Stalinism as Thermidor
Western Retreat and Eastern
Reconciliation
A. VICTOR SERGE
Within the ranks of the Fourth International, a rejection of Trotsky’s position

on the Soviet Union resulted not only in theoretical confusion, but also had
practical implications. An early example occurred near the end of Trotsky’s
life involving a polemic inside the American-based Socialist Workers Party
(SWP). In 1939, after the Soviet Union invaded Finland and Poland, some
SWP members, notably Max Shachtman and James Burnham, insisted that
this was an act of imperialism. They claimed that the USSR was no lon-
ger a workers’ state, but was now ruled by a new bureaucratic class. Both
Shachtman and Burnham found that Trotsky’s position on the USSR was too
close to Stalinism and even apologetic for it.‌‌
However, Trotsky’s position on the USSR did not flow from any senti-
mental attachment, but from an objective study of its internal dynamics. He
argued that the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state, albeit degenerated,
since it still rested on collective property relations. For Trotsky, imperialism
was still the main enemy, so the proletariat must defend the Soviet Union in
any conflict with the former. When it came to Shachtman and Burnham’s
claims that the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic collectivist state, Trotsky
believed that this smacked more of moralism, empiricism, and adapting to
anti-communist moods than one based on a materialist approach.1 Eventually,
Shachtman and Burnham left the SWP and adopted the position of the Cold
War counter-Enlightenment.
What Shachtman and Burnham represented was a “Western retreat” within
the Fourth International. Another example of this position can be found in
Victor Serge. Serge did a better job of explaining his own departure from
249
250 Chapter Seven
revolutionary Marxism than Shachtman and Burnham. Since his journey was
cut short by an untimely death, Serge was still working through all the uncer-
tainties and reservations of the path that he was on.
The Belgian-born child of Russian exiles, Victor Serge spent his early
years as an anarchist agitator and journalist. Like others of his generation,
Serge was shocked by the support of many anarchists and socialists for
World War I. However, the Russian Revolution renewed his hopes in an anti-
capitalist future. Making his way to Soviet Russia in 1919, Serge served in a
machine gun battery defending Petrograd from the Whites and worked as a
translator for the Comintern.
After the end of the civil war, Serge was dismayed at the authoritarian
and bureaucratic tendencies that appeared in Russia, fearing that they would
destroy the revolution. Serge was pessimistic that a regeneration of the
revolution’s libertarian spirit could come from inside the Communist Party.
Instead, his eyes turned to the Western proletariat as the only power capable
of saving the Russian Revolution.
Serge went abroad to work for the Comintern as a journalist. He found
himself in Germany during the tumultuous year of 1923 when the Communist
Party made an abortive effort to take power. The KPD’s failure ensured the
prolonged isolation of the Soviet Union. When the Comintern searched for
scapegoats inside the KPD for the defeat, Serge became even more disheart-
ened about developments in Russia: “But now the ECCI, solicitous above all
for its own prestige, condemns the ‘opportunism’ and inefficiency of the two
leaders of the KPD, Brandler and Thalheimer, who have been so incompetent
in managing the German Revolution. But they did not dare move a finger
without referring the matter to the Executive!”2 Once more, Serge went
abroad. This time, he found himself in Vienna, where he befriended both
Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci.
In 1925, Serge returned to the Soviet Union, where he immediately
found himself within the ranks of the Left Opposition. Despite his fervent
support, Serge considered the Left Opposition to be involved in a quixotic
venture. Still, he maintained that even if the odds were against them, the Left
Opposition must fight if there was just the slimmest likelihood to save the
revolution: “As far as I was concerned everything was summed up in one
conviction: even if there were only one chance in a hundred for the regen-
eration of the Revolution and its workers’ democracy, that chance had to
be taken at all costs.”3 Ultimately, Trotsky’s defeat in 1927 only confirmed
Serge’s foreboding that the USSR was facing its Thermidor.
After being expelled from the Communist Party, Serge was arrested in
1928. During his time in prison, he nearly died. After recovering, Serge
made the fateful decision to devote his life to writing to preserve the truth
of the revolutionary movement from Stalinist falsifications. Over the next
Western Retreat and Eastern Reconciliation 251
several years, he wrote a history of the revolution, Year One of the Russian
Revolution (1930) and three novels Men in Prison (1930), Birth of Our Power
(1931), and Conquered City (1932).4 His works were banned in the USSR,
but they were published abroad in France. This not only ensured Serge’s liter-
ary reputation among French intellectuals, but likely saved his life.
In 1933, Serge was arrested once more by the Soviet police. This time, he
was charged with conspiring with Trotsky. Serge refused to sign any docu-
ments presented to him. He recalled later that his time in prison gave him
unique insights into the police methods employed later in the Moscow Trials:
“If I have lingered so long in describing my examination this is because it was
a great help later on, along with what I know from other sources, in enabling
me to understand how the great Trials were fabricated.”5 After eighty-five
days in solitary confinement, the charges were dropped, and Serge was sent
into internal exile.
Serge spent the following three years at Orenburg with other exiled oppo-
sitionists. He fictionalized these experiences in his novel Midnight in the
Century (1939). In the novel, Serge described how the opposition viewed the
twin triumphs of Hitler and Stalin as symbolizing “midnight in the century”
that would only end in disaster:
There are singular congruencies between the two dictatorships. Stalin gave
Hitler his strength by driving the middle classes away from Communism with
the nightmare of forced collectivization, famine, and terror against the techni-
cians. Hitler, by making Europe abandon the hope of socialism, will strengthen
Stalin. These grave-diggers were born to understand each other. Enemies and
brothers. In Germany, one is burying an aborted democracy, the child of an
aborted revolution. In Russia, the other is burying a victorious revolution born
of a weak proletariat and left on its own by the rest of the world. Both of them
are leading those they serve—the bourgeoisie in Germany, the bureaucracy here
at home—toward a catastrophe.6
Still, Serge remained hopeful that the possibility remained to rejuvenate

the revolution. He noted that a new working class had been created by the
Five-Year Plan. However, it would take time for these workers to gain con-
sciousness and organize themselves. For now, it seemed little could be done
by the opposition except to defend their ideas and program.
As Serge languished in Orenburg, protests mounted in France against his
imprisonment. His cause was championed by a diverse array of syndical-
ists, ex-communists, and left intellectuals such as Magdeleine Paz, Marcel
Martinet, Luc Durtain, Léon Werth, Boris Souvarine, and Jacques Mesnil. By
contrast, the Communist Party defended Serge’s incarceration. Louis Aragon
stated that he was lucky to be shown mercy: “the Soviet government showed
252 Chapter Seven
far too much indulgence by not shooting him on the spot.”7 Despite the best
efforts of the PCF, L’Affaire Victor Serge would not go away.
The high point of the Serge scandal occurred in 1935 at the International
Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. This anti-fascist event
was attended by luminaries of the French left such as Paul Nizan, Romain
Rolland, André Gide, Henri Barbusse, André Malraux, and Louis Aragon.
From Russia were Mikhail Koltsov, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak, and
Isaac Babel. Other prominent guests included Bertolt Brecht, Mike Gold, and
Aldous Huxley. Serge’s supporters were also in the audience. One, Gaëtano
Salvemini, managed to speak up on his behalf. This puzzled the Soviet del-
egates, who either feigned ignorance or stayed quiet.
These protests were not in vain though. Rolland lobbied quietly behind the
scenes with Maxim Gorky and Stalin for Serge’s release. Later, Serge was
appreciative of Rolland’s efforts, but angered since he continued to support
Stalin: “Perhaps he knew his own impotence, but why did he refuse to at
least liberate his conscience? At age seventy the author of Jean-Christophe
allowed himself to be covered with the blood spilled by a tyranny of which
he was a faithful adulator.”8
In April 1936, Serge was granted an exit visa. He managed to leave the
Soviet Union, but lost nearly all his manuscripts in the process. Denied entry
into France, Serge ended up settling in Belgium. His release occurred mere
months before the first Moscow Trial, leading Serge to conclude that there
was no grand plan behind the purge:
I am conscious of being the living proof of the unplanned character of the first
trial and, at the same time, of the crazy falsity of the charges brought up in all the
Trials. I had departed from the USSR in mid-April, at a time when practically all
the accused were already in prison. I had worked with Zinoviev and Trotsky, I
was a close acquaintance of dozens of those who were to disappear and be shot,
I had been one of the leaders of the Left Opposition in Leningrad and one of its
spokesmen abroad, and I had never capitulated. Would I have been allowed to
leave Russia, with my skill as a writer and my firm evidence as a witness whose
facts were irrefutable, if the extermination trials had been in the offing? Then
too, not one mad accusation had been made against me in the whole course of
the Trials, which proved that lies were being spread only about those with no
means of defending themselves.9
In Belgium, Serge resumed his activity on behalf of the Trotskyist Opposition,

working closely with Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov. One task he eagerly undertook
was translating The Revolution Betrayed into French. Trotsky had such a high
opinion of Serge’s abilities as a translator that he refused to double-check the
work. In addition, Serge wrote two books, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and
Destiny of a Revolution (1937), which were broadly supportive of Trotsky’s

outlook on the USSR.
Serge worked diligently to expose the Moscow Trials as fabrications. Yet
he found that the left intelligentsia in Europe was unwilling to listen. For
instance, the French League for the Rights of Man, which had famously
defended Alfred Dreyfus, now refused to criticize the USSR. Serge bitterly
noted their cynical reasoning: “‘Russia is our ally . . .’ It was imbecilic rea-
soning—there is more than a hint of suicide about an international alliance
that turns into moral and political servility—but it worked powerfully.”10
Serge said that the struggle against fascism could not be won with allies who
mimicked it: “We are building a common front against Fascism. How can we
block its path, with so many concentration camps behind us?”11
While Serge was alienated from the pro-Soviet left, he began developing
differences with Trotsky on several issues. One point of contention between
them was the Spanish Civil War. Serge was a supporter of the POUM, while
Trotsky considered them to be centrists for participating in the popular front.
According to Serge, this Marxist orthodoxy was an obstacle to solidarity with
genuine Spanish revolutionaries:
In my opinion we must support this party in every way, re-establish truly com-
radely relations with it and not demand from it an orthodoxy which it cannot
have. The main thing is not to conduct any factional sectarian work there and not
to aspire to lead this revolutionary organisation from outside. In this respect a
number of comrades have piled up a lot of blunders, aggravated the relationship
and caused a highly undesirable reaction. Whatever you may say, the POUM
represents a militant unit now, which behaves on the whole very courageously
and reasonably and holds out great hopes in a situation of very grave danger.12
A second point of disagreement revolved around how to assess the Russian

Revolution and the origins of Stalinism. In 1938, a debate erupted between
Trotsky and his American supporters such as Dwight MacDonald over the
Kronstadt Uprising. MacDonald said that the Bolshevik suppression of the
mutiny and their reasoning for it paved the way for the later methods and
slanders of Stalinism: “I can’t see as much difference as I would like to
see between Trotsky’s insistence that, because the enemies of the revolu-
tion have used the Kronstadt affair to discredit Bolshevism, therefore all
who express doubts about Kronstadt are (‘objectively’ considered) allies of
counter-revolution; and Vyshinsky’s insistence that the Fourth International
and the Gestapo are comrades-in-arms because both oppose the Stalinist
regime.”13 Since Trotsky was commander of the Red Army when Kronstadt
occurred, MacDonald was implicating him as an accomplice in generating
Stalinism.
254 Chapter Seven
Trotsky defended his role and accused his critics of painting a romanticized
portrait of Kronstadt:
Your evaluation of the Kronstadt uprising of 1921 is basically incorrect. The

best, most self-sacrificing sailors were completely withdrawn from Kronstadt
and played an important role at the fronts and in the local soviets throughout the
country. What remained was the gray mass with big pretensions (“We are from
Kronstadt”), but without political education and unprepared for revolutionary
sacrifice. The country was starving. The Kronstadters demanded privileges. The
uprising was dictated by a desire to get privileged food rations. The sailors had
cannon and battleships. All the reactionary elements, both in Russia and abroad,
immediately seized upon this uprising. The White emigres demanded aid for the
insurrectionists. The victory of this uprising could bring nothing but the victory
of the counterrevolution, entirely independent of the ideas the sailors had in
their heads.14
Serge entered this debate and agreed with MacDonald that the seeds of
Stalinism were found in the Bolshevik suppression of Kronstadt:
Was it right to repress movements whose underlying origins were in a

working-class democracy? My own inclination is to believe that quite early on
there was an abuse of “firmness,” that is of administrative and military measures
in relation to the masses and the dissidents of the revolution. Experience has
shown that this facilitated the installation of bureaucratic despotism.15
Trotsky was enraged and condemned Serge for standing against him: “Instead
of stamping on the traitors of the revolution and falsifiers of history, you
immediately spoke in their defence. Your excuse and extenuations make
things no better, only worse. Our enemies get the opportunity to say, ‘Even
Victor Serge, who’s only got secondary disagreements with Trotsky, recog-
nises that . . . ,’ and so on.”16 He believed that Serge’s attitude toward Kronstadt
was a sign of eclecticism, moralism, and centrism that was unsuited to the
realm of revolutionary politics: “Victor Serge, who, it would seem, is trying
to manufacture a sort of synthesis of anarchism, POUMism, and Marxism,
has intervened very unfortunately in the polemic about Kronstadt.”17
A third point of divergence between Trotsky and Serge occurred over Their
Morals and Ours (1938). This pamphlet was written by Trotsky in response to
the arguments of the pragmatist John Dewey and former revolutionaries who
said that Bolshevik amorality led to Stalinism. As opposed to this abstract
moralism, Trotsky claimed that revolutionary morals were rooted in the
concrete reality of the class struggle. This raised the question of the relation-
ship between ends and means. For communists, the end was the liberation of
humanity and the means used must correspond to this. For Trotsky, this stood
in stark contrast to the approach of Stalinism:
Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which
unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to
oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echo-
ers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their
courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it flows
that not all means are permissible. When we say that the end justifies the means,
then for us the conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those
base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts,
or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the
faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it by worship
for the “leaders.”18
Trotsky concluded that communists must understand that working-class

self-emancipation is the starting point for Marxist ethics.
Serge translated Their Morals and Ours into French. While he praised
Trotsky’s work, he doubted its overall argument about revolutionary eth-
ics. In a private letter, Serge told Marcel Martinet that he found Trotsky too
closed-minded:
It is dynamic and well thought out from a narrow-minded point of view, histori-
cally obsolete, and falsifies everything, fanatically. I think that I will not—at
least at this time—treat this subject and respond to the Old Man, or if so, only
minimally, in order not to play dead to his attacks . . . his intransigence has
become deadly dull, tediously overbearing.19
In an unpublished essay, Serge attacked Trotsky’s conception of morality for

ignoring human sentiment:
When he denounces the hypocrisy of conventional morality, the (bourgeois)

class spirit of church and university morality, and that of intellectual circles;
when he hunts down in its lair the mediocrity of liberal idealism; when he main-
tains that the class struggle weighs more—much more—than human sentiment;
when he legitimizes the rigors of the civil war, Trotsky is right and strikingly
so, and it is comforting to hear again the voice of the intrepid militants of the
Russian Revolution. But these questions, which are not only moral ones, but
rather embrace all of action and thought, have [an] aspect aside from that of the
class struggle: they are posed within the working class and its organizations.
They are posed in relation to socialism, both as a goal and as an action. And
Trotsky seems to ignore this fact.20
256 Chapter Seven
Serge’s qualms about Trotsky and revolutionary morality were not expressed
publicly. However, he inadvertently found himself at the center of a very open
and bitter debate. The French release of Their Morals and Ours contained a
blurb that attacked the book. Trotsky falsely assumed that Serge had writ-
ten it. In June 1939, Trotsky wrote an addendum titled “The Moralists and
Sycophants against Marxism: Peddlers of Indulgences and Their Socialist
Allies, or the Cuckoo in a Strange Nest” where he fiercely attacked Serge:
But inasmuch as in the present case the author happens to be on the other side of
the ocean, some “friend,” apparently profiting from the publisher’s lack of infor-
mation, contrived to slip into a strange nest and deposit there his little egg oh!
it is of course a very tiny egg, an almost virginal egg. Who is the author of this
prospectus? Victor Serge, who translated the book and who is at the same time
its severest critic, can easily supply the information. I should not be surprised if
it turned out that the prospectus was written . . . naturally, not by Victor Serge
but by one of his disciples who imitates both his master’s ideas and his style.
But, maybe after all, it is the master himself, that is, Victor Serge in his capacity
of “friend” of the author?21
Trotsky concluded that Serge was a petty-bourgeois moralist and was unable
to think like a Marxist revolutionary. According to Trotsky, Serge could only
reason in a fragmented manner and could not comprehend the internal con-
nection between theory and practice. As a result, Serge did not understand
the reality of revolution, but instead found comfort in democratic illusions.
Trotsky believed that this led to Serge’s departure from Marxism:
When our “democrat” scurries from right to left, and from left to right, sowing
confusion and scepticism, he imagines it to be the realization of a salutary free-
dom of thought. But when we evaluate from the Marxian standpoint the vacilla-
tions of a disillusioned petty-bourgeois intellectual, that seems to him an assault
upon his individuality. He then enters into an alliance with all the confusionists
for a crusade against our despotism and our sectarianism.22
The debate over Their Morals and Ours marked the definitive break between
the two men. Serge was so devastated by what happened that he refused to
comment publicly on Trotsky’s accusations. However, he was also glad to be
out of the ranks of the Fourth International. Serge said that Trotsky’s insis-
tence on orthodoxy was akin to Stalinist dogmatism and intolerance:
Slandered, executed, and murdered, Trotskyism was displaying symptoms of an

outlook in symmetry with that of the very Stalinism against which it had taken
its stand, and by which it was being ground into powder. . . . I am well enough
acquainted with the integrity of its militants to know that they, too, are unhappy
with it. But it is impossible to struggle against social and psychological facts of
this magnitude with impunity. You cannot cling to an authoritarian doctrine that
belongs to the past without paying the price. I was heartbroken by it all, because
it is my firm belief that the tenacity and willpower of some men can, despite all
odds, break with the traditions that suffocate, and withstand the contagions that
bring death. It is painful, it is difficult, but it must be possible. I abstained from
any counter-polemic.23
Moreover, Serge also took his distance from Trotskyism on the Russian
Question. He still agreed with the Fourth International that Bolshevism did
not necessarily lead to Stalinism. He believed that there was always the pos-
sibility for different outcomes: “It is often said that the germ of Stalinism was
in Bolshevism. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained
many other germs—a mass of other germs—and those who lived through the
enthusiasm of the first years of the Revolution ought not to forget it. To judge
the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse—and
which he may have carried with him since his birth—is this very sensible?”24
However, Serge contended that Bolshevism had flaws such as authoritarian-
ism and fear of the masses. These traits facilitated the rise of Stalinism. Serge
located the revolution’s degeneration with the foundation of the Cheka: “I
believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most
impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918, when
plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads.”25 With the
Cheka, the Bolsheviks created a police-state that employed the mechanisms
of an inquisition. Serge concluded that Trotskyism never truly confronted this
reality, meaning that its struggle against Stalinism failed to look at the defects
of Proletarian Jacobinism.26
Serge’s politics remained in transition when World War II began. For the
moment, he needed to avoid being captured and executed. After the Germans
invaded France, he fled south into the unoccupied zone. However, Serge
found no safety since Vichy did not welcome leftists. Thanks to the help
of American intellectuals such as Dwight MacDonald, John Dewey, Max
Eastman, Meyer Schapiro, Herbert Solow, James Farrell, and Sidney Hook,
Serge was granted an exit visa. Although he was denied entry to the United
States, Serge reached the safety of Mexico. It was a bittersweet moment
since Serge arrived several months after Trotsky’s assassination in August
1940, leaving him no chance at reconciling with the Old Man. Serge did
make an amends of sorts with Trotsky’s widow Natalia Sedov, with the two
coauthoring The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (1947).
In Mexico, Serge found himself politically isolated from the left. He was
shunned by both the Communists and Trotskyists with only a few co-thinkers
in a small group, Socialismo y Libertad. As a result, Serge could only watch
events from afar with no way to intervene. He lived in poverty, and most
258 Chapter Seven
of his writings remained unpublished. Only after his death would they find
an audience.
Despite his isolation, Serge continued to ponder the meaning of Stalinism,
most notably in his novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1941), which is
about a fictionalized fourth show trial. In the book, events are set in motion
when a poor Soviet citizen named Kostia shoots the commissar Tulayev,
whom he randomly encounters on the street. When word reaches Stalin, he
naturally suspects a wide-ranging conspiracy behind the assassination. Stalin
orders the arrest of the commissar’s friends, relatives, and acquaintances. The
web of suspicion ends up extending all the way to Siberia and the battlefields
of Republican Spain. However, the police do not find the culprit since Kostia
left no clues.
Strangely, the most compelling character in Tulayev is Stalin (only called
“the Chief”). Serge portrays him as a man who is trapped in the system that he
created. Stalin is identified with the bureaucratic machine, but finds himself
doing what the machine requires. Despite the immense power of the dictator-
ship, nothing seems to work. Everyone appears to be lying to Stalin, even
when they sing his praises. There always seem to be wreckers and spies who
ruin everything. Desperately, Stalin demands arrests, trials, and executions,
but it is never enough.
As Stalin says in the novel:
You know, brother, veterans like you, members of the old Party, must tell me
the whole truth . . . the whole truth. Otherwise, who can I get it from? I need
it, I sometimes feel myself stifling. Everyone lies and lies and lies! From top to
bottom they all lie, it’s diabolical . . . Nauseating . . . I live on the summit of an
edifice of lies—do you know that?
....
“Certainly . . . We have had too many traitors . . . conscious or unconscious . . .

no time to go into the psychology of it. . . . I’m no novelist.” A pause. “I’ll
wipe out every one of them, tirelessly, mercilessly, down even to the least of
the least. . . . It is hard, but it must be . . . Every one of them . . . There is the
country, the future. I do what must be done. Like a machine.27
For Serge, Stalin was neither a diabolical genius nor the conscious betrayer
of the revolution, but someone who genuinely believed that he was serv-
ing history:
I think I presented an accurate psychological portrait of Stalin. He didn’t break

faith, he changed, and history marched on: he bears the heavy burden of a medi-
ocre and powerful personality. He believes in his mission: he sees himself as the
savior of a revolution threatened by ideologues, the idealistic and the unrealistic

(recall Napoleon’s contempt for the ideologues). He fought them as he could,
with his inferiority complex, his jealousies, his terror of men superior to him and
whom he couldn’t understand. He cast them from his savior’s path by the only
methods he had at his disposal: terror and lies, the methods of a limited intel-
ligence governed by suspicion and placed at the service of an immense vitality.28
Serge’s Tulayev is a devastating portrait of the Stalinist belief in historical

necessity. He notes that this conception does not account for accidents or con-
tingencies. When they occur, Stalinism can see them only as part of a cosmic
grand plan. Ultimately, this leads to terror and madness.
Serge’s hopes in the viability of a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism
receded by the end of World War II. In the postwar era, he believed that
traditional capitalism would be replaced by massive totalitarian states run by
new classes of administrators and technicians. This meant that the orthodox
Marxist schema of class struggle was now obsolete. Serge concluded that the
old tactics inherited from Bolshevism must be abandoned by socialists:
That we are well and truly being carried along by the current of an immense
revolution, but that there will not be a repetition of the Russian Revolution
unless as secondary episodes. That socialism must renounce the ideas of worker
dictatorship and hegemony and become the representative of the large numbers
of people in whom a socialist-leaning consciousness is germinating, one obscure
and without a doctrinal terminology.”29
In this brave new world, proletarian revolution was off the historical agenda.
Serge believed that the only hope for socialism lay in appealing to moderate
and democratic demands. Since the working class was by nature reform-
ist, socialists must accept that. Whatever Serge’s lingering nostalgia for
Bolshevism and Trotskyism, he was now effectively championing social
democracy.
According to Serge’s biographer Suzi Weissman, he characterized the
USSR as “bureaucratic totalitarian with collectivist leanings.”30 He con-
sidered this formation to be neither socialist nor capitalist, but a new form
of class society. Serge explicitly drew on James Burnham’s ideas about
managerial revolution to reach this conclusion. As Serge wrote in Partisan
Review, he did not think that the existence of a managerial class was at odds
with Marxism:
Capitalist economy is going under, yielding to new types of transitional planned

economies: capitalism is so hopeless that we see the counter-revolutions it
incited now forced to strangle their begetter, as in Germany and Italy and tomor-
row elsewhere perhaps under other forms. But this does not do away with the
260 Chapter Seven
problem of socialism. It remains in the very heart of the planned economies,

because of the clash of interests (material and immaterial) between the rulers
and the masses. Nor should we neglect the factors of psychology and tradi-
tion. From this standpoint, the struggle bears quite different aspects, according
to whether the new managerial class is the product of an anti-working class
and anti-Marxist counter-revolution, respectful (in theory) of private property,
wedded to the principles of authority and hierarchy, as is the case in Germany
and Italy—or whether it is a class of usurpers who still invoke an ideology and
tradition conflicting with its usurpation and standing for the democracy of work
and the complete liberation of man. I emphasize this in order to emphasize that
even from the viewpoint of the “managerial revolution” deep antagonisms exist
between Nazism and Stalinism. In every case, finally, when confronted with a
planned economy, we should pose the question: “Planned by whom? Planned
for whom? Planned for what end?” It is on this front that socialists will fight in
the future, side by side with the masses.31
Like Burnham and Orwell, Serge feared that the postwar world would be
dominated by communist totalitarianism. The Red Army had survived the tri-
als of Stalingrad and was now marching to Berlin, but Serge wondered if they
would keep moving west. Looking at the predominance of Communists in
the anti-Nazi resistance movements, he saw the greatest danger to socialism:
“That Stalinism, which molded and nourished the armed resistance move-
ments in France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere, constitutes the worst
danger, a mortal danger which we would be mad to aspire to fight on our
own.”32 Serge viewed Communist leaders like Josef Tito and Mao Zedong to
be duplicitous backstabbers, who would act like revolutionaries but transform
into counterrevolutionaries as soon as the Kremlin commanded it: “I fear that
we’ll soon see arising in various countries Communist-totalitarian condottieri
of the Mao Zedong and Tito type, cynical and convinced, who’ll be ‘revolu-
tionaries’ and counterrevolutionaries, or both at once, according to the orders
they receive, and capable of turning about face from one day to the next.”33
Serge wrote to Dwight MacDonald warning that the Communist move-
ment was a deadly force controlled by Moscow: “the Communist apparatus
controls perfectly and mercilessly all the movements it influences. . . . This
apparatus, with its functional, police, and psychological mechanisms, is an
enormous new fact in history whose deadly importance has not yet been
measured. You live in too free a country to imagine this.”34 In addition,
Serge believed that national liberation struggles led by communist parties
were simply directed by Stalinist dupes. When it came to Ho Chi Minh and
the Viet Minh, he said: “As a Communist, Ho Chi Minh rules in the name
of the Kremlin . . . And that poses to all of us—liberals, socialists, radicals
alike—this question: should we sympathize with colonial revolts when their
real meaning is the expansion of totalitarianism?”35 For Serge, the socialist

left could only survive by defeating the threat of Stalinism.
By the end of his life in 1947, Serge openly expressed support for con-
servatives, provided they were securely anti-communist. In one of his final
letters, Serge wrote to André Malraux, now a Gaullist, asking for help getting
his novel Les Derniers temps published. In his letter, Serge came out openly
in favor of Gaullism:
I wish to tell you that I judge the political position you have adopted to be coura-
geous and probably reasonable; if I myself were in France, I should be among
those socialists who support collaboration with the movement of which you are
a member. The electoral victory of your movement, which I foresaw but whose
magnitude surprised me, was in my opinion a great step towards the immediate
safety of France.36
Defenders of Serge such as Peter Sedgwick and Weissman say that Serge
did not embrace anti-communism in this letter. They argue that he wanted
to mend relations with Malraux and that his words were later taken out of
context. Furthermore, they claim that Serge’s support for Gaullism did not
coincide with his overall politics.37 Since Serge died shortly after this letter
was written, he could not provide any clarification about his views. However,
there is no anomaly in Serge’s pro-Gaullism. In fact, it is perfectly in line with
his anti-communism.
Serge’s own personal experience seemed only a confirmation of the
sinister and totalitarian nature of Stalinism. As an outspoken anti-Stalinist,
Serge was physically attacked when he spoke at meetings. He suspected
that the Soviet Union was plotting his assassination: “I was told last night
that my assassination has been commanded and set for soon. The words of
a well-known Communist were quoted: ‘I wouldn’t give a penny for V. S.’s
skin.’”38 Serge also speculated that the Stalinists made sure that his work went
unpublished: “In every publishing house . . . there is at least one conservative
and two Stalinists, and nobody has the slightest understanding of the life of
a European militant.”39
Even though Serge had effectively abandoned revolutionary Marxism
in his twilight years, he always maintained a sentimental attachment to
Bolshevism. As evidence of this, one need only look at “Thirty Years After
the Russian Revolution,” published on the thirtieth anniversary of the
Bolshevik Revolution on November 7, 1947. In this essay, Serge defended
the original ideals of the Russian Revolution against Stalinist smears. There
was even a tinge of his old Trotskyism when he predicted the popular over-
throw of Stalinism by the reawakened Soviet proletariat: “It is my belief that
262 Chapter Seven
totalitarian regimes constitute colossal factories of revolt. And this one all the
more because of its revolutionary tradition.”40
When Victor Serge died of a heart attack on November 17, 1947, his politics
remained in flux. Clearly, Serge attempted to maintain a socialist perspective
that was distinct from Stalinism. However, the pressures of poverty, political
pessimism, and declining health took their toll on him. He found it impos-
sible to escape the pull of emerging Cold War anti-communism. Like many
other former Trotskyists such as the New York Intellectuals who abandoned
a revolutionary perspective, Victor Serge retreated to the Western camp.41
B. ISAAC DEUTSCHER
The “Western retreat” had its counterpart with an “eastern reconciliation”

inside the ranks of Trotskyism. Early examples were Karl Radek, Evgeny
Preobrazhensky, and Christian Rakovsky who all abandoned the Left
Opposition and made their peace with Stalinism. In general, the “eastern”
deviation gave up on a political revolution against Stalinism. They claimed
that the bureaucracy was not only capable of reform, but that it served the
interests of historical necessity. In effect, this meant a convergence with the
camp of Stalinism. The most sophisticated representative of this current of
“eastern reconciliation” can be found in the work of Isaac Deutscher.
As already discussed, Deutscher was one of the great Marxist historians
of the twentieth century. In 1927 at the age of twenty, Deutscher joined the
illegal Communist Party of Poland (KPP). Already a talented journalist, he
quickly became an editor for the party’s clandestine press and also conducted
propaganda work inside the Polish army.
In 1931, Deutscher traveled to the Soviet Union, where he watched the
construction of a new society. While there he was offered two academic
posts but turned them down. Deutscher was uneasy after seeing the results
of the Five-Year Plan. These were his first doubts about the direction of the
USSR under Stalin. As his longtime friend Daniel Singer said: “It would be
a misgiving to claim that Deutscher perceived at once the nature of the new
regime and that his reservations against Stalinism dates back to this trip. But
his doubts were strengthened in an uneasy rather than triumphant mood.”42
After returning to Poland, Deutscher continued his party work. Like many
communists, he anxiously watched the rise of the Nazi Party in neighbor-
ing Germany. In defiance of the Third Period line, Deutscher argued that
a united front between socialists and communists was needed to fight the
NSDAP. He formed a small opposition group inside the party and sounded
the alarm with the article “Danger of Barbarism Over Europe.” This caused
the KPP to immediately expel Deutscher from its ranks in November 1932
for “exaggerating” the threat of Nazism. Now he was considered a dangerous

renegade by the party. As his wife Tamara said: “From that day two sleuths
shadowed him: one employed by the Polish police, and the other a volunteer
from the Stalinist party cell.”43
As fate would have it, Deutscher had begun reading Trotsky’s Bulletin of
the Opposition and he fully agreed with its criticisms of the Third Period.
After leaving the KPP, Deutscher joined the small Polish Trotskyist move-
ment and quickly became one of its leaders. When the Moscow Trials began,
Deutscher was shocked when dedicated Bolsheviks were accused of high
treason. Trembling with anger, he wrote The Moscow Trial, a pamphlet
exposing the show trials as a product of a bureaucratic counterrevolution:
“The August trial was an act of bloody vengeance of the political reaction
against the revolution, a revenge of the thermidorian bureaucracy on the old
party of the October Revolution.”44 Deutscher believed that Trotsky and the
Left Opposition were the real targets of Stalin’s purges since they represented
the unsullied banner of revolutionary Bolshevism.
While Deutscher largely agreed with Trotsky on Soviet affairs, he sharply
disagreed with the Old Man’s decision to launch the Fourth International in
1938. Deutscher argued that it was premature to create a new international
since the workers’ movement was in a period of ebb: “The creation of every
one of the earlier Internationals constituted a definite threat to bourgeois rule.
. . . This will not be the case with the Fourth International. No significant
section of the working class will respond to our manifesto. It is necessary to
wait.”45 Deutscher did not attend the inaugural meeting that September, but
he did write the theses delivered by the Polish section which argued against
forming the international. Max Shachtman, who was presiding at the opening
meeting, hurled abuse at the “Mensheviks” in their midst.46 Once the Poles
were outvoted and the Fourth International was created, Deutscher left the
Trotskyist movement.
At almost the exact same moment that the Fourth International was founded,
the Polish Communist Party was formally dissolved by the Comintern. A
great many of the KPP’s rank-and-file and Central Committee members had
emigrated to the USSR to escape persecution at home. Now they were caught
up in the purges and arrested en masse as Polish spies. Some of the founders
of the party, such as Adolf Warski, Henryk Walecki, and Wera Kostrzewa,
were executed. Deutscher had known them personally and despite disagree-
ments, he still believed that they were dedicated communists. As he said later:
I also remember the image of Warski at the Theatre Square on 1 May 1928. He
was marching in the forefront of our huge and illegal demonstration, through
the hail of machine-gun fire and rifle shots with which we were greeted by the
Socialist Party militia, while tens and hundreds of wounded were falling in our
264 Chapter Seven
ranks, he held up his white-grey head, a high and easy target visible from afar;
unyielding and unmoved, he addressed the crowd. This was the image of him I
had in my mind when, some years later, it was announced from Moscow that he
was a traitor, a spy and a Piłsudski agent.47
Now without a political home, Deutscher returned to journalism to make a

living. In April 1939, he took a position as the London correspondent for
Nasz Przeglad. The move ended up saving his life. Less than six months
later, Poland was invaded by the Wehrmacht, and Deutscher’s entire family
was murdered in the Holocaust. Arriving in London, he had no knowledge of
English, but Deutscher proved a quick study. He ended up mastering English
better than most native speakers. His prose was so eloquent that Deutscher has
been favorably compared to another Polish exile, the novelist Joseph Conrad.
In England, Isaac met his future wife, Tamara. He also joined the Polish
army in exile. Deutscher’s Marxist convictions got him in trouble when he
protested anti-Semitism in the army and was promptly sent to a punitive
camp. After being released in 1942, Deutscher became a regular correspon-
dent for the Economist. Eventually he became the journal’s expert on Soviet
affairs and its chief European correspondent.
During the war Deutscher began seriously reassessing his views on the
Soviet Union. He was astounded by the Soviet war effort and the heroism
of the Red Army. Despite the deformations of Stalinism, he claimed that the
USSR remained socialist. In the struggle against Nazi barbarism, he was not
neutral, but argued the international working class had a stake in the Red
Army’s victory over fascism:
It is a battle for the very existence of the workers’ movement and the freedom
of European peoples—a freedom without which socialism cannot be achieved.
Such is the objective logic of historical development. Only the blind or pretend-
ers to the role of quislings fail to understand that logic. In the terse war com-
muniques we socialists read not only the reports about “normal” war operations;
we are also reading in them the fate of the deadly struggle between revolution
and counterrevolution.48
Ultimately, the Red Army’s victory over the Third Reich caused Deutscher
to reconsider the orthodox Trotskyist view of Stalinism. In his biography
Stalin (1949), Deutscher said that he remained a severe critic of Stalinism,
but wanted to be objective by looking at how Stalin laid the foundations for
socialism. As he wrote later: “The core of Stalin’s genuine historic achieve-
ment lies in the fact that he found Russia working with the wooden plough
and left her equipped with atomic piles.”49
Deutscher’s newfound defense of Stalinism meant a new appraisal of the
stages of revolution. He argued that there was a law common to all revolutions
whether in France, England, or Russia. At their outbreak, revolutions depend

on mass mobilization and a wide base of popular support. After taking power,
a revolutionary party must call upon the people to defend the new regime
from the inevitable onslaught of the counterrevolution. In this heroic period,
the bond between the people and the revolutionary party is unbreakable,
meaning the masses will undertake whatever sacrifice is deemed necessary
by the leaders.
However, this identification between the people and the revolutionaries
does not survive the trials of civil war. Both the party and masses change.
Due to devastation, the original promises of the revolution cannot be fulfilled
by the party. Many of the best sons of the revolution die in battle while others
leave the movement in disillusionment. As popular support falls away from
the revolutionary party, it must create a minority dictatorship to hold onto
power. To preserve the conquests of the revolution, this dictatorship lashes
out at both the extreme left (who accuse the party of betrayal) and the right
(who demand a restoration). Once these twin threats are eliminated, the party
proceeds to construct a new order through a revolution from above.50
Based on his understanding of the revolutionary process, Deutscher con-
cluded that Stalin represented, not the betrayal of the Russian Revolution, but
its preservation and continuation. He claimed that Stalin’s role was analogous
to those of great bourgeois revolutionary leaders: “What appears to be estab-
lished is that Stalin belongs to the breed of the great revolutionary despots,
to which Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon belonged.”51 When Stalin
spread the Soviet model throughout Eastern Europe, Deutscher said that this
was similar to how Napoleon’s conquests extended the ideals of the French
Revolution by bayonet:
The chief elements of both historic situations are similar: the social order of
eastern Europe was as little capable of survival as was the feudal order in the
Rhineland in Napoleon’s days; the revolutionary forces arrayed against the
anachronism were too weak to remove it; then conquest and revolution merged
in a movement, at once progressive and retrograde, which at last transformed
the structure of society.52
Deutscher’s conclusions on the progressive nature of Stalinism meant that

now he disagreed with Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Thermidor:
defeat of the Opposition in [1923] was not in any sense an event comparable to
the collapse and dissolution of the Jacobin party; it corresponded rather to the
defeat of the left Jacobins which had taken place well before Thermidor. While
Trotsky was writing The Revolution Betrayed the Soviet Union was on the eve
of the great purge trials-in France the épurations were part and parcel of the
Jacobin period; only after Robespierre’s downfall was the guillotine brought to
266 Chapter Seven
a halt. Thermidor was in fact an explosion of despair with the permanent purge;
and most of the Thermidorians were ex-Dantonists and ex-Hebertists who had
survived the slaughter of their factions. The Russian analogy to this would have
been a successful coup against Stalin carried out, after the trials of 1936–1938,
by remnants of the Bukharinist and Trotskyist oppositions.53
Far from being a counterrevolution, Deutscher asserted that the Stalinist

Thermidor was a necessary stage to consolidate the gains of the revolution.
Deutscher’s analysis on the historical necessity of Stalinism assumes that
both bourgeois and proletarian revolutions were structurally similar. In addi-
tion, he says that another force can substitute itself for either the bourgeoi-
sie or the proletariat in the revolutionary process. For example, Deutscher
observed that the classification of the English and French Revolutions as
bourgeois revolutions did not depend upon the presence or leadership of the
bourgeoisie itself in the overarching process:
Capitalist entrepreneurs, merchants, and bankers were not conspicuous among

the leaders of the Puritans or the commanders of the Ironsides, in the Jacobin
Club or at the head of the crowds that stormed the Bastille or invaded the
Tuileries. . . . Yet the bourgeois character of these revolutions will not appear at
all mythical, if we approach them with a broader criterion and view their gen-
eral impact on society. Their most substantial and enduring achievement was to
sweep away the social and political institutions that had hindered the growth of
bourgeois property and of the social relationships that went with it.54
Since these revolutions eventually resulted in capitalism, despite lacking

direct bourgeois leadership, Deutscher says that it makes sense to consider
them as bourgeois revolutions. This theory has the benefit of explaining how
the Meiji Restoration and Bismarck’s unification of Germany can be consid-
ered bourgeois revolutions despite lacking any direct involvement from the
bourgeoisie. However, the problem with Deutscher’s analysis does not lie in
his understanding of bourgeois revolutions, which was considered compat-
ible with the positions of more orthodox Marxist approaches provided by
Alexander Callinicos and Neil Davidson.
Rather, the issue with Deutscher is his conflation of bourgeois and proletar-
ian revolutions. While a bourgeois revolution does not necessarily require a
capitalist class to play a leading role, a self-conscious working class is neces-
sary for a socialist revolution. In his critical review of Stalin, Max Shachtman
pointed out these flaws in Deutscher’s understanding:
The socialist revolution does not even lend itself to the kind of comparison with
the bourgeois revolution that Deutscher makes.
The emancipation of the working class, said Marx, is the task of the working
class itself. To which we add explicitly what is there implicitly: “of the con-
scious working class.” Is this mere rhetoric, or a phrase for ceremonial occa-
sions? It has been put to such uses. But it remains the basic scientific concept of
the socialist revolution, entirely free from sentimentality and spurious idealism.
...
In other words, the economic structure that replaces capitalism can be socialist
(socialistic) only if the new revolutionary regime (the state) is in the hands of
the workers, only if the working class takes and retains political power. For,
once capitalist ownership is destroyed, all economic decisions are necessarily
political decisions—that is, decisions made by the state which now has all the
economy and all the economic power in its hands. And if the working class then
does not have political power, it has no power at all.55
By mixing up bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, Deutscher ends up

justifying the inevitability of Thermidor in both. This means he is forced to
conclude that for socialism, Stalinism is inescapable since no alternative is
historically possible. Moreover, when Deutscher transforms Stalinism into
a revolutionary force, it becomes possible for him to conceive of social-
ism coming from Red Army invasions. In effect, Deutscher abandons the
Marxist contention that a socialist revolution must be based on proletarian
self-emancipation.56
Yet Deutscher’s positive reevaluation of Stalinism did not mean he lost
his earlier esteem for Trotsky. In his masterful three volume biography of
Trotsky—The Prophet Armed (1954), The Prophet Unarmed (1959), and The
Prophet Outcast (1963)—Deutscher succeeded in rescuing him from oblivion
and Stalinist defamation. However, Deutscher does not see Trotsky as the
Soviet Babeuf, but as its Cassandra whose prophetic warnings were ignored:
“He ran so far ahead of his time that more than thirty years later much of his
prediction still remains unconfirmed by events; but the truth of so much of it
has since been demonstrated that few would venture to dismiss as chimerical
the prophecy as a whole.”57 As a result, Deutscher sees Trotsky more as a
tragic hero whose struggle against Stalinism could only end in failure.
While Deutscher argues for the historical necessity of Stalinism, this does
not make him an uncritical apologist for Stalin along the lines of Bloch,
Garaudy, or Aragon. He readily acknowledges that Stalin’s methods were
horrific and criminal: “Stalin undertook, to quote a famous saying, to drive
barbarism out of Russia by barbarous means. Because of the nature of the
means he employed, much of the barbarism thrown out of Russian life has
crept back into it.”58 Now that Stalinism had accomplished the essential task
of modernization, Deutscher believed its autocratic methods were a brake
268 Chapter Seven
on the future development of socialism: “The only credit which one must
and ought to give Stalinism is that it has been creating in Russia and in the
countries of the Soviet orbit the material and organizational preconditions of
socialism. In social psychology and culture it has fostered, on the contrary,
bureaucratic rigidity and stupidity on the one hand and an almost zoological
individualism on the other.”59 Now that Stalinism had outlived its useful-
ness, Deutscher said that reforms must be undertaken to introduce socialist
democracy.
Deutscher believed that this task should have rightfully fallen to Trotsky
and the Left Opposition. Since Stalin had exterminated all Oppositionists,
this left the USSR without any organized political force who could carry out
changes from below. This meant that reform could only conceivably come
from inside the top ranks of the Communist Party itself: “Such was the amor-
phousness of the popular mind that even after Stalin’s death no anti-Stalinist
movement could spring from below, from the depth of the Soviet society;
and the reform of the most anachronistic features of the Stalinist regime
could be undertaken only from above, by Stalin’s former underlings and
accomplices.”60
His contention that Stalinism would not survive Stalin’s death put
Deutscher at odds with the theorists of totalitarianism. The Cold War counter-
Enlightenment fervently believed that the Stalinist dictatorship was largely
omnipotent and immune to any internal change. Deutscher found totalitarian-
ism preposterous since it froze history in place, something not unlike how
Stalinism viewed the world:
The whole world is supposed to be subject to dialectical change. Nothing in it is

static. Everywhere rages the struggle of antagonistic elements which forms the
essence of change. Everything is growth and decay. Only at the frontiers of the
Stalinist realm is Dialectics refused an entry visa, apparently as a visitor suspect
of un-Soviet activity. In Stalinist Russia there are and there can be no antago-
nistic elements, no contradictions, no processes of real change and transforma-
tion—only the harmonious evolution and perfection of society.61
Deutscher believed that his prediction about the end of Stalinism was vin-
dicated by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign: “[Khrushchev] has
shattered the system of terroristic rule bequeathed by Stalin. [He] has also
given a new impulse to the reversal of the trend that had led from the single
party to the single leader, and from the monopoly of power to the monopoly
of thought.”62 However, Deutscher noted the limitations of Khrushchev, who
did not challenge the basis of bureaucratic rule or rehabilitate purged com-
munists such as Trotsky: “[Khrushchev] lifted a corner of the curtain over
the Stalin era, but could not raise the whole curtain. And so the moral crisis,
opened up by Khrushchev’s revelations, remains unresolved.”63 As a result,

Khrushchev’s reforms stopped partway, and socialist democracy remained
out of reach.
As an enthusiast for de-Stalinization, Deutscher cautioned the Eastern
European working class against acting rashly and endangering this reformist
process. He believed that revolts from below would inevitably lead to capital-
ist counterrevolution. Deutscher claimed that the Red Army was a progres-
sive force that had saved Eastern Europe from capitalist restoration: “Eastern
Europe (Hungary, Poland, and eastern Germany), however, found itself
almost on the brink of bourgeois restoration at the end of the Stalin era; and
only Soviet armed power (or its threat) stopped it there.”64 For Deutscher, the
Cold War meant the class struggle had changed its form and was now carried
out by two superpowers, who represented opposed social systems.
This analysis led Deutscher to oppose the Berlin Uprising of 1953. As he
told Heinrich Brandler: “It goes without saying that the workers of Berlin had
their very good grievances and that the Russians and their marionettes have
done everything to provoke the storm. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the
effect of the Berlin revolt has been objectively counter-revolutionary and not
revolutionary.”65 Deutscher argued in a similar manner during the Hungarian
Revolution of 1956. He recognized that widespread revulsion against the
Stalinist Rákosi led directly to a popular revolt. However, Deutscher said
that the Hungarian rebels were dominated by reactionaries: “Yet within this
outwardly harmonious anti-Stalinist movement there were from the begin-
ning two separate currents in actual or potential conflict with one another,
and a tense and only partly open struggle went on between Communists and
anti-Communists. . . . But in that wave the anti-Communist current from
the beginning was much more powerful than the Communist one. “66 If the
Hungarian uprising had succeeded, then it would have emboldened anti-
communists around the world. Therefore, Deutscher concluded that it was a
tragic necessity for the Soviet Union to send its tanks into Budapest.
While Deutscher opposed violent action from below in the People’s
Democracies, he did support oppositional Marxists who engaged in peace-
ful agitation. In the 1960s when dissident leftists were arrested in Poland,
Deutscher angrily wrote to Gomułka in protest:
You have not, as far as I know, jailed and put in chains any of your all too
numerous and virulent anti-Communist opponents; and you deserve credit for
the moderation with which you treat them. But why do you deny such treatment
to your critics on the Left? Hass, Modzelewski and their friends have been
brought to the courtrooms handcuffed and under heavy guard. Eye-witness
accounts say that they raised their chained fists in the old Communist salute
and sang the Internationale. This detail speaks eloquently about their political
270 Chapter Seven
characters and loyalties. How many of your dignitaries, Wladyslaw Gomulka,

would nowadays intone the Internationale of their own free will and choice?67
When Khrushchev’s reforms stalled, Deutscher looked elsewhere for inspira-

tion. He cast an eye on the Chinese Revolution as a possible socialist alter-
native to the USSR. Unlike the Eastern European People’s Democracies, he
noted that the People’s Republic of China was the product of an authentic
popular revolution: “The very magnitude of the Chinese Revolution and
its intrinsic momentum have been such that it is ludicrous to consider it as
anybody’s puppet creation.”68 In fact, Deutscher noted that the triumph of the
Chinese Revolution was where his analogy between the Russian and French
Revolutions ended. It was Mao’s victory that ended the conditions of inter-
national isolation that had led to the emergence of Stalinism: “The victory
of Chinese communism marks the end of that isolation; and it does so much
more decisively than did the spread of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Thus, one
major precondition for the emergence of Stalinism now belongs to the past.”69
Yet Deutscher was candid enough to recognize that China still contained
many elements of Stalinism such as the personality cult surrounding Mao.
However, he believed that Maoism contained a great deal of promise since it
did not repeat egregious Soviet mistakes such as the forced collectivization
of agriculture: “The Chinese have been far less reckless and brutal in col-
lectivizing farming; and for a long time far more successful. Even the rural
communes do not seem to have antagonized the peasants as disastrously as
Stalin’s collectivization did.”70
His hopes were further raised after Mao gave his speech “On the Correct
Handling of Contradictions Among the People” in 1956. Deutscher con-
sidered this to be more meaningful and bold than Khrushchev’s tepid
de-Stalinization:
Mao Tse-tung’s address “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among

the People” represents by far the most radical repudiation of Stalinism that has
come out of any communist country so far. . . . Mao attempts, in effect, to rede-
fine the whole concept of proletarian dictatorship and to restore to it the mean-
ing which Marxists generally gave to it before the onset of the Stalin era. . . . In
the USSR, socialism, the totalitarian state and the monolithic party had become
identified to such an extent that Communists brought up in the Stalinist school
of thought could not even imagine the one without the other. Against this, Mao
holds that socialism can and indeed must dissociate itself from the totalitarian
state, which is essentially alien to it, and that the Communist Party to be united
and effective in action need not at all be “monolithic” in thought. This is what
Khrushchev and his colleagues will not admit even now after all they have done
to reform and “liberalise” post-Stalin Russia.71
Deutscher’s hopes of a Maoist alternative to Stalinism soon receded. The

failure of the Hundred Flowers campaign meant a return to monolithic ortho-
doxy in China. His feelings on the Sino-Soviet split were mixed. Deutscher
said that the leftist positions of Mao were analogous to Trotsky and the Left
Opposition in the 1920s. Yet he was dismayed that China refused to form a
united front with the USSR against American imperialism. It was the Cultural
Revolution that definitively ended Deutscher’s infatuation with Maoism. He
considered the whole event to be nihilistic and retrograde for its xenophobia,
attacks on intellectuals, and promotion of the personality cult: “All this goes
to show that the ‘cultural revolution’ has been negative only, that it has had
no positive content, no positive idea.”72
In his last work, The Unfinished Revolution (1967), Deutscher remained
hopeful that the Soviet Union would fulfill the original promises of 1917.
Now that the planned economy was in place, it was time for soviet democ-
racy to be restored. While the revolution had created a new working class, it
remained locked out of power. He believed that it was now time for workers
to take charge: “If this analysis is correct then the prospect for the future may
be more hopeful. An objective process of consolidation and integration is
taking place in the working class, and it is accompanied by a growth of social
awareness. . . . And if this happens the workers may re-enter the political
stage as an independent factor, ready to challenge the bureaucracy, and ready
to resume the struggle for emancipation in which they scored so stupendous
a victory in 1917, but which for so long they have not been able to follow
up.”73 At his death, Deutscher was optimistic that the working class would
finally cast off its bureaucratic shackles and that the USSR would fulfill the
socialist dream.
As a historian and writer, Deutscher contributed a great deal to the revi-
talization of revolutionary thought in the 1960s. His biography of Trotsky
introduced countless radicals to anti-Stalinist Marxism. As David Horowitz
said in appreciation of Deutscher: “It was Deutscher’s unique achievement
that he constructed in his exile a Marxist vision of Bolshevism and its fate,
which could serve as a bridge between the tradition and achievements of the
old revolutionary left and the new . . . and of restoring meaning once again to
the idea of Communism.”74
Other attributes of Deutscher’s legacy were not so admirable. His advocacy
of bureaucratic self-reform instead of political revolution found a receptive
ear among currents inside Trotskyism. Michel Pablo, a leader of the Fourth
International, concluded that the Soviet Union and other Stalinist coun-
tries were bound to endure for centuries as deformed workers’ states, so he
embraced a reformist view. After the Berlin Uprising, Pablo believed his anal-
ysis was vindicated when reforms were granted by the Stalinist bureaucracy:
272 Chapter Seven
In reality events will oblige them as is being demonstrated in Eastern Germany,

and partly in Czechoslovakia to quicken and extend the concessions to keep the
impatient masses in the other buffer-zone countries and in the USSR itself from
taking the road of action. But once the concessions are broadened, the march
forward toward a real liquidation of the Stalinist regime threatens to become
irresistible.75
The American Trotskyist James P. Cannon said Deutscher and Pablo had
shared illusions of reforming the Stalinist bureaucracy. If those ideas were
carried to their logical conclusion, then this meant a renunciation of politi-
cal revolution and the existence of a separate anti-Stalinist Marxist current.
In effect, Cannon believed that Deutscherism was tantamount to political
liquidation:
Our interest in Deutscher derives from the evident fact that his theory of the
self-reform of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he tries to pass off as a modified
version of Trotsky’s thinking, has made its way into the movement of the Fourth
International and found camouflaged supporters there in the faction headed by
Pablo. Far from originating anything themselves, the Pablo faction have simply
borrowed from Deutscher.
Since there is no surer way to disarm the workers’ vanguard, particularly in the
Soviet Union, and to reason away the claim of the Fourth International to any
historical function, this new revisionism has become problem number one for
our international movement. The life of the Fourth International is at stake in the
factional struggle and discussion provoked by it.76
Within the ranks of Cannon’s SWP, the Class War tendency around Sam
Marcy adopted “Deutscherite” positions as well. In 1956, Marcy supported
the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by claiming that the insur-
gents were counterrevolutionaries. After leaving the SWP in 1959, Marcy
formed the Workers’ World Party with its perspective of “global class war.”
Like Deutscher, Marcy argued that the conflict between the Soviet bloc and
American imperialism now superseded the class struggle internationally and
within each country. For Marcy, this meant any criticism of the Soviet Union
and its allies was objectively counter-revolutionary.77 While Marcy was crude
in his thinking compared to Deutscher, in their analysis of the USSR they
both ended up replacing Marxist class struggle with campist geopolitics.
Deutscher’s ideas also influenced Perry Anderson, Fred Halliday, and Tariq
Ali, who were associated with the New Left Review, a premier socialist jour-
nal in the Anglophone world. For example, Perry Anderson saw Stalinism as
a revolutionary and socialist force, particularly in the Third World:
The structures of bureaucratic power and mobilization pioneered under Stalin

proved to be both more dynamic and more general a phenomenon on the inter-
national plane than Trotsky ever imagined. . . . The states they created were to be
manifestly cognate (not identical: affinal) with the USSR, in their basic politi-
cal system. Stalinism, in other words, proved to be not just an apparatus, but a
movement—one capable not only of keeping power in a backward environment
dominated by scarcity (USSR); but of actually winning power in environments
that were yet more backward and destitute (China, Vietnam)—of expropriat-
ing the bourgeoisie and starting the slow work of socialist construction, even
against the will of Stalin himself. Therewith, one of the equations in Trotsky’s
interpretation undoubtedly fell.78
In analyzing the renewed Cold War of the 1980s, Fred Halliday viewed it
through a Deutscherite lens as a struggle between socialism and capitalism.
However bureaucratically deformed the Eastern Bloc, Halliday said that it
represented the interests of the proletariat in the global class war. Halliday
even took Deutscher’s analysis of Stalinism a step further by coming out in
favor of “progressive” military juntas who led “revolutions from above.” This
led Halliday—and Marcy too! – to embarrassingly applaud the pro-Soviet
military dictatorship in Ethiopia.79
Finally, Tariq Ali, a former leader of the International Marxist Group in
Britain, followed Deutscher in supporting reformist bureaucrats in the Soviet
Communist Party. After 1985, Ali was an enthusiast for Perestroika, believ-
ing that Gorbachev would carry out Deutscher’s “revolution from above”:
“Gorbachev represents a progressive, reformist current within the Soviet
elite. . . . In order to preserve the Soviet Union, Gorbachev needs to complete
the political revolution (which is already underway), but one based on an
abolition of the whole nomenklatura system of privileges on which the power
of the Soviet bureaucracy rests.”80 Unlike Deutscher, Ali lived long enough to
see his ideas of bureaucratic self-reform utterly falsified by history in 1991.
Victor Serge and Isaac Deutscher looked respectfully in very different
directions: one to the Cold War counter-Enlightenment and anti-communism
and the other to Stalinism and historical fatalism. Despite this divergence,
Serge and Deutscher both found themselves in the same place. While
they placed different value judgements on the Dialectics of Saturn, both
believed it to be an inevitable force. In the end, Serge’s “Western retreat”
and Deutscher’s “eastern reconciliation” meant a practical abandonment of
revolutionary Marxism.
274 Chapter Seven
NOTES
1. See Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973a).
It is beyond the scope of this work to discuss the untenable and anti-communist nature
of bureaucratic collectivism. Those interested should consult Doug Greene, A Failure
of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism (Washington:
Zero Books, 2021), 192–97. For a recent work that argues in favor of Trotsky’s inter-
pretation against the pitfalls of either Soviet apologism or third campism, see Donald
Parkinson, “Carrying the Burden of Communist Man,” Cosmonaut, November 1,
2019. https://cosmonaut.blog/2019/11/01/carrying-the-burden-of-communist-man/;
On the inconsistencies of state capitalism, see Ernest Mandel, “The Mystifications
of State Capitalism,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www marxists.org/archive/
mandel/1970/08/state-cap htm.
2. Serge 2012, 205. See also Serge’s reportage in Weimar Germany in 1923 in Vic-
tor Serge, Witness to the German Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011b).
3. Serge 2012, 257.
4. During this period, Serge also gathered material for Year Two of the Russian
Revolution. The manuscript was seized by the secret police along with those of two
novels Les Hommes perdus and La Tourmente when he left the USSR. Despite efforts,
none of those works have been found. See Richard Greeman, “Victor Serge and the
Novel of Revolution,” Marxists Internet Archive. http://www marxists.de/culture/
greeman/sergenovel htm; Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course is Set On Hope
(New York: Verso, 2001), 168–71.
5. Serge 2012, 343.
6. Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century (New York: New York Review Books,
2015), 76. Walter Benjamin thought Serge’s novel had little literary value:
As a matter of conscience I will note a novel by Victor Serge, Midnight in the

Century. The author is of the same party as Souvarine—as you no doubt know.
His book has no literary value, and holds the attention only for its picturesque
descriptions of Stalinist terror. It is far below the triptych of the Soviet regime
that Panait Istrati painted ten years ago.
See Walter Benjamin, “1940 Survey of French Literature,” New Left Review 51
(May–June 2008): 44.
7. Richard Greeman, “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left,” Victor
Serge: The Century of the Unexpected Essays on Revolution and Counter-Revolution,
Revolutionary History 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 147.
8. Victor Serge, Notebooks 1936–1947 (New York: New York Review Books,
2019), 508.
9. Serge 2012, 385.
10. Ibid., 387.
11. Ibid., 390.
12. “Serge to Trotsky—January 10, 1937,” in The Serge-Trotsky Papers, ed. David
Cotterill (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 100.
13. Dwight Macdonald, “Once More: Kronstadt,” Marxists Internet Archive.

https://www marxists.org/history/etol/writers/macdonald/1938/04/kronstadt.htm; For
background on Kronstadt, see Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970).
14. “The Questions of Wendelin Thomas,” in Trotsky 1978b, 359. See also Trotsky
2016, 368. See also Leon Trotsky, “Suggestions of a Pamphlet on Kronstadt,” Writ-
ings of Leon Trotsky [Supplement 1934–1940] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1979b).
15. Victor Serge, “‘Ideas and Facts; Kronstadt 1921—Against the Sectarian
Spirit—Bolshevism and Anarchism,’” in Cotterill 1994, 166. Earlier in 1922, Serge
agreed with Trotsky that Kronstadt represented Thermidor:
Let us suppose briefly that the Kronstadt mutiny had turned out to be victorious.
Its results would have been immediate chaos, the terrible kindling of a civil war
in which this time the party of the revolutionary proletariat and the broad peas-
ant masses would have been locked in combat. Within a short time a handful
of liberal lawyers and Tsarist generals, fortified by the sympathies of the whole
bourgeois world, would have drenched their hands in the blood of the Russian
people in order to pick up the abandoned power. Thermidor would have come.
See Victor Serge, “The Tragic Face of Revolution,” in Cotterill 1994, 18. See also
Serge 2012, 150–51.
16. “Trotsky to Serge—April 15, 1938,” in Cotterill 1994, 107–8.
17. “Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1937–1938] (New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), 142. See also Trotsky’s harsh words about Serge in
“Petty-Bourgeois Democrats and Moralizers,” in 1979b, 872.
18. Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2004), 50.
19. Quoted in Weissman 2001, 224.
20. Victor Serge, “Unpublished Manuscript on Their Morals and Ours,” Marxists
Internet Archive. https://www marxists.org/archive/serge/1940/trotsky-morals.htm.
21. Trotsky 2004, 56–57.
22. Ibid., 62.
23. Serge 2012, 407. See also Cotterill 1994, 158. Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov said his
father’s intransigence had grown worse as a result of political isolation:
I think that all Dad’s deficiencies have not diminished as he has grown older, but
under the influence of his isolation, very difficult, unprecedentedly difficult, got
worse. His lack of tolerance, hot temper, inconsistency, even rudeness, his desire
to humiliate, offend and even destroy have increased. It is not “personal,” it is a
method and hardly good in organisation of work.
Quoted in ibid., 155.

24. Victor Serge, “The Old Man and the Fourth International,” in Cotterill
1994, 200.
276 Chapter Seven
25. Serge 2012, 94. See also “The Old Man and the Fourth International,” in Cot-
terill 1994. 181. A condemnation of the Cheka can be found in Victor Serge, Portrait
de Staline (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1940), 57–58.
26. Nearly concurrently, other voices within Trotskyism were faulting Bolshevism
and Proletarian Jacobinism for Stalinism. For example, Boris Souvarine’s biography
of Stalin said the following:
From the very beginning the Bolsheviks were obsessed by the French Revolution
to which they have continued to refer, whether as an example to be followed or a
precedent to be avoided. The germ of the tendency which constituted at once the
strength and the weakness of Lenin’s party was already discernible—the abil-
ity to organise and to act as a disciplined army capable of carrying out orders,
but always at the mercy of an error on the part of their leader and in danger
of sinking into an intellectual passivity contrary to their theoretical mission as
vanguard and model.
See Souvarine 1939, 65.

Much later, Samuel Farber in Before Stalinism would argue that Lenin’s Jacobinism
helped pave the way for Stalinism. Farber claims Lenin’s “actions on freedom of the
press and other democratic questions inevitably and necessarily led to a thoroughly
elitist form of government” and that “the Bolsheviks firmly adopted policies that
moved them a considerable distance towards what later became the Stalinist totali-
tarian model” ( 99 and 109). Farber claims that “Lenin’s original views on the party
and society were closer to [Jacobinism] than to Stalinism. His sometimes uncritical
endorsement of the Jacobins is very suggestive in this regard,” but adds “Moreover,
Lenin’s ‘quasi-Jacobinism’ was also characterized by an insufferable arrogance that
is, unfortunately, too often found among revolutionaries in general. This arrogance
seems to be based on the attitude or belief that the truth of the revolutionary activists’
vision is sufficient guarantee of their authority to act” (213–14). Quoted in Samuel
Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (New York: Verso,
1990). Italics in the original.
27. Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York: New York Review
Books, 2004), 161 and 166. See also Richard Greeman, “The return of Comrade
Tulayev: Victor Serge and the tragic vision of Stalinism,” Marxists Internet Archive.
https://www marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1993/isj2–058/greeman html
and Christopher Hitchens, “Pictures of an Inquisition,” Arguably (New York: Twelve,
2011), 585–94.
28. Serge 2019, 250–51. See also Serge 1940, 175 and Susan Weissman, “On
Stalinism,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 28, no. 1 (2000): 199.
29. Serge 2019, 436. See also ibid., 356–77.
30. Weissman 2000, 204.
31. Victor Serge, “What is Fascism?” Partisan Review 8, no. 5 (September–Octo-
ber 1941): 420–21. Serge did not accept Burnham’s ideas on managerial revolu-
tion whole cloth. He thought that Burnham’s abandonment of Marxism had led to
major errors of analysis such as viewing the USSR as the product of a managerial
revolution. In 1945, Serge took issue with Burnham, who argued for the continuity
between Lenin and Stalin. See Serge 2019, 511–14.
32. Serge 2019, 436.
33. Ibid., 465.
34. Ibid. At other times, Serge appeared open to united fronts with communists:
“We cannot adopt a purely negative attitude to the CP. We shall get nowhere if we
seem more preoccupied with criticising Stalinism than with defending the working
class. The reactionary danger is still there, and in practice we shall often have to act
alongside the Communists.” See Victor Serge, “To René Lefeuvre,” Marxists Internet
Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/194x/xx/lefeuvre.html.
35. Victor Serge, “The Communists and Vietnam,” Politics 4, no. 2 (March–April
1947): 76.
36. Quoted in Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 2002), 383. This letter was not included in the 2012 reissue.
37. Ibid., 383–87. Weissman says: “The letter to Malraux shocked left circles and
became infamous because it appeared that Serge had changed sides in his final hour.
He had not.” See Weissman 2001, 182.
38. Serge 2019, 138. Serge wrote about the attacks on him in the US-based New
Leader, which was edited by Daniel Bell and connected to the Socialist Party of
America. Serge’s relations with the New York Intellectuals are discussed at length in
Alan Wald, “Victor Serge and the New York Anti‐Stalinist left,” Critique: Journal of
Socialist Theory 28, no. 1 (2000): 99–117.
39. Quoted in Serge 2012, xxxii. For more on Serge’s last years, see Julián Gor-
kin, “The Last Years of Victor Serge, 1941–1947,” Victor Serge: The Century of the
Unexpected Essays on Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Revolutionary History 5,
no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 199–208.
40. Victor Serge, Russia Twenty Years After (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press,
1996), 327.
41. On the deradicalization of the New York Intellectuals, see Alan Wald, The New
York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to
the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 366–68.
42. Daniel Singer, “Armed with a Pen,” in Isaac Deutscher: The Man and His
Work, ed. David Horowitz (London: Macdonald, 1971), 28.
43. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1968), viii.
44. Isaac Deutscher, “The Moscow Trial,” in Marxism, Wars and Revolutions:
Essays from Four Decades (London: Verso, 1984b), 6. Lowercase in the original.
45. Deutscher 2003c, 341.
46. Ibid.
47. “The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party,” in Deutscher 1984b, 113. See
also William Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist
Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 286–89.
48. “22 June 1941,” in Deutscher 1984b, 19.
49. Isaac Deutscher, Russia after Stalin (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 55.
278 Chapter Seven
50. Deutscher 1966, 173–75. Deutscher also expands on his comparison between
the French and Russian Revolutions in “Two Revolutions,” in Deutscher 1969, 53–67
and Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967 (Oxford: Oxford
51. Deutscher 1966, 565–66.
52. Ibid., 555.
54. Deutscher 1967, 22. On the consequentialist theory of bourgeois revolutions,
see Alex Callinicos, “Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism,” Interna-
tional Socialism. www marxists.org/history/etol/writers/callinicos/1989/xx/bourrev
.html; For other engagements with Deutscher’s work on bourgeois revolutions, see
Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Hay-
market Books, 2012), 439–46 and Neil Davidson, “The Prophet, His Biographer, and
the Watchtower: Isaac Deutscher’s Biography of Leon Trotsky,” in Holding Fast to
an Image of the Past: Explorations in the Marxist Tradition (Chicago: Haymarket,
2017), 81–110.
55. Max Shachtman, “Four Portraits of Stalinism—V: A Critique of Deutscher’s
Work on Stalin,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/
shachtma/1950/09/deutscher-stalin htm; While Shachtman makes valid points against
Deutscher, there are problems in how he views the relationship between the prole-
tariat and a workers’ state. He appears to imply that there can only be socialism if the
entire proletariat is class conscious. This method allows him to conclude that China,
Cuba, Vietnam, etc were not workers’ states. Furthermore, by this criteria Shachtman
would have to dismiss the October Revolution as well, since there were workers
who supported nonrevolutionary parties. The relationship between party and class
is far more complicated than Shachtman makes it out to be. There certainly needs
to be working-class involvement for socialism, but also a vanguard detachment of
advanced workers.
56. Here it is worth recalling Trotsky’s remarks on the character of property expro-
priations carried out in Poland when the Red Army invaded in 1939. Trotsky said
these measures were “revolutionary in character,” he noted that they were achieved in
a “military-bureaucratic fashion.” What truly mattered to Trotsky was not the nation-
alization of property but raising the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat.
He noted that so long as the USSR refused to do that, then its overall politics were a
hindrance to the advancement of communism:
The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property rela-
tions in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but
rather the change in the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat,
the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplish-
ing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of
Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and
remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.
See Trotsky 1973a, 19. For more on the process of “structural assimilation” carried
out by the USSR in Eastern Europe after World War II, see Tim Wohlforth, ‘Com-
munists’ Against Revolution: The Theory of Structural Assimilation (London: Folrose
Books, 1978).
57. Deutscher 2003b, 182.
58. Deutscher 1966, 568.
59. “Correspondence with Heinrich Brandler,” in Deutscher 1984b, 144.
61. Deutscher 1953, 14.
62. Isaac Deutscher, “Khrushchev on Stalin,” in Russia in Transition (New York:
Grove Press, 1960), 48.
63. Deutscher 1967, 101.
64. Deutscher 2003b, 429. See also Deutscher 2003c, 420.
65. “Correspondence with Heinrich Brandler,” in Deutscher 1984b, 146.
66. Isaac Deutscher, “The Polish and Hungarian Revolts,” in Russia, China and
the West: A Contemporary Chronicle, 1953-1966, ed. Fred Halliday (Oxford: Oxford
67. “An Open Letter to Władysław Gomułka,” in Deutscher 1984b, 129.
68. “Two Revolutions,” in Deutscher 1969, 64. See also “Three Currents in Com-
munism,” Deutscher 1971a, 73.
69. “Two Revolutions,” in Deutscher 1969, 66.
70. “Maoism—Its Origins and Outlook,” in Deutscher 1984b, 205. These remarks
are particularly ironic since it was written in 1964 after the disaster of the Great Leap
Forward.
71. “Mao and the Hundred Flowers,” in Deutscher 1970, 104.
72. Isaac Deutscher, “Deutscher on the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution,’” Marxists
Internet Archive. https://www marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1966/china htm; See
also Deutscher 1967, 95–96 and “Meaning of the ‘Cultural Revolution’” in Deutscher
1970, 333–39.
73. Deutscher 1967, 50.
74. Quoted in Horowitz 1971, 9 and 14. Horowitz dedicated his book Empire and
Revolution to Deutscher. After renouncing Marxism, Horowitz said that Deutscher
had wasted his talent on a failed project and that he falsely wagered on the self-reform
of the USSR. See Horowitz 1998, 96. After leaving the Trotskyist movement,
Deutscher never joined another political organization. In his own words, Deutscher
retreated to his “watch-tower” in order to observe events “with detachment and alert-
ness.” See “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience,” in Deutscher 1969, 20. As Tony Cliff
remarks, there really is no difference between the watchtower and political inaction:
“Deutscher does not tell us what is the difference in practice between inhabiting an
ivory tower and a watchtower. In both cases no action is expected.” Tony Cliff, “The
End of the Road: Deutscher’s Capitulation to Stalinism,” Marxists Internet Archive.
https://www marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/deutscher.htm Emphasis in the
original.
75. Michel Pablo, “The Post-Stalin ‘New Course,’” Marxists Internet Archive.
https://www marxists.org/archive/pablo/1953/xx/newcourse htm.
280 Chapter Seven
76. James P. Cannon, “Trotsky or Deutscher? On the New Revisionism and Its
Theoretical Source,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www marxists.org/archive/
cannon/works/1954/tord.htm.
77. See Sam Marcy, “The Global Class War,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://
www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/gclasswar/index html.
78. Perry Anderson, “Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism” in The Stalinist Legacy,
edited by Tariq Ali (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), 125–27. According to Perry Ander-
son: “In [New Left Review’s] case, the formative influence of Isaac Deutscher was
obviously of primary importance.” See Anderson 1980, 151. For more background
about the influence of Deutscher on Anderson’s thinking, see Paul Blackledge, Perry
Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (London: Merlin, 2004), 3–4.
79. See Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983),
30. Fred Halliday edited Russia, China, and the West, a collection of Deutscher’s
journalistic works on the Eastern Bloc. As Anderson observed about Halliday’s The
Making of the Second Cold War: “It is fitting that the best work confronting the cur-
rent Cold War should have been produced out of direct inspiration from [Deutscher’s]
example.” Quoted in Deutscher 1984b, xix. On Ethiopia, see Fred Halliday and
Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution (London: Verso, 1981), 25–38. For an
exhaustive criticism of “left” apologetics for the Ethiopian military regime, see Ian
Scott Horst, Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! The Revolutionary Left in Ethio-
pia, 1969–1979 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020).
80. Tariq Ali, Revolution from Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going? (London,
Hutchinson, 1988), xiii. In a further irony, the book was dedicated to the fervent anti-
communist Boris Yeltsin. For more background on Deutscherite-influenced Marxists,
see Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990),
52–54. Unlike Ali, Sam Marcy was opposed to Gorbachev and Perestroika. See Sam
Marcy, “Perestroika: a Marxist Critique [1990],” Marxists Internet Archive. https://
www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/perestroika/index htm.
Chapter Eight
Escaping Fate
“How understand a game in which the devil cuts the cards?”1 These words
of Ernst Fischer, a lifelong Austrian Marxist, speak to the incomprehensible
nature of Stalinism felt by millions in the international communist movement.
They dedicated their lives to revolution and a world free of exploitation and
oppression, yet found themselves unable to explain the crimes, treason, and
horrors that Stalinism wrought. Instead, the bloody actions of Stalinism were
all rationalized as a historical stage for the working class to pass through
before entering the promised communist future. This was believed by com-
munists until such blind faith could no longer be sustained. From the anticom-
munist camp, Stalinism was perceived as a demonic force that was given the
different names of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Big Brother, and totalitarian reason.
For them, Stalinism came as a “bolt from the blue” to enslave humanity under
a hammer and sickle.
Throughout this work, the various approaches to Stalinism have been
viewed as distinct and mutually opposed. A surface view would conclude that
there was not much in common between the “bolt from the blue” camp and
historical necessitarians. After all, it cannot be denied that Stalinists and anti-
communists were on opposite sides of the barricades. Yet this study reveals
that these two aforementioned camps are not actually so very far apart. The
Stalinist and the anticommunist share the same underlying fatalistic and ahis-
torical logic. Whether Stalinism appears as a savior or the Antichrist, both
agree that there is no alternative to it. In the end, the Dialectic of Saturn is
unavoidable and socialist revolutions must end in Stalinism.
To understand Stalinism, one must avoid the dangerous reefs of both the
counter-Enlightenment Scylla and the Thermidorian Charybdis. The course
to safely chart through these waters is provided by Trotsky’s Marxism. While
revolutions do follow similar patterns with the same actors often appearing,
this does not mean that these events are mere carbon copies of one another.
A bourgeois revolution does require a Thermidor, but a socialist revolution
does not. The Stalinist outcome in Russia was not a fated outcome as if
281
282 Chapter Eight
preordained by some god of history. Stalinism can only be claimed as inevi-

table by ignoring the communist roads not taken.
What is the final verdict on Stalinism? The Dialectics of Saturn is not just
about understanding the past, but also envisioning the future. If one accepts
that all revolutions are fated to devour their own children, then our chances
of liberation become impossible. Instead of the mystical fatalism of Stalinist
“necessity”—and all other pseudo-Hegelian constructions—real insight into
historical necessity is required. The more one understands, the more it will
be possible to avoid the fate of a counterrevolutionary Saturn, and all other
superstitions inherited from the horrors of the twentieth century. As Trotsky
said in the darkest moments of the Show Trials, quoting Spinoza: do not cry,
do not weep, but understand.
NOTES
1. Ernst Fischer, An Opposing Man (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 283.

Appendix
Domenico Losurdo
A Critical Assessment of Stalin: The
History and Critique of a Black Legend
The late Domenico Losurdo (1941–2018) was an Italian-born Marxist

philosopher who taught at the University of Urbino. He was the author of
acclaimed studies on liberalism, Kant, Marxism, Gramsci, Lukács, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Hegel. Losurdo was not simply an academic, but a dedicated
activist on the communist left.
Unfortunately, in line with the traditions of both the international com-
munist movement and Western Marxism, Losurdo was also a defender of
Stalinism. In a number of works, most notably Stalin: The History and
Critique of a Black Legend (2008), Losurdo claims that Stalinism was a
historical necessity since it represented the politics of realism. He argues that
revolutions must pass from the stages of “utopianism” to “realism” if they
are to prevail. Following Hegel’s analysis of the French Revolution, Losurdo
argues that this event underwent a “Dialectic of Saturn” (a term he coined)
when it shifted from Jacobinism to Thermidor and Bonapartism. This passage
from radical utopianism to realism was necessary because it was not enough
for the revolution to destroy the Ancien Régime, but a new bourgeois one had
to be constructed.1
For Losurdo, a Dialectic of Saturn does not simply apply to bourgeois
revolutions. Rather, he argues that this process appears in all revolutions.
In 1917, Losurdo observed that the revolution was driven forward by mes-
sianic visions of universalism represented above all by the figure of Trotsky.
While this revolutionary zeal was sufficient for defeating Kerensky and
the White Armies, it could not suffice when it came to constructing social-
ism. For Losurdo, Trotsky’s Proletarian Jacobinism needed to surrender to
Stalin’s Thermidorian realism. Ultimately, this clash between the Bolshevik
radicals and moderates ended in a bloody civil war: “The accusation or the
283
284 Appendix
suspicion of betrayal emerges at every turn of this particularly tortured revo-

lution, driven by the government’s need to reconsider some of the original
utopian motives, and in any case forced to moderate their grand ambitions
given the extreme difficulties of the objective situation.”2 Thus, he concludes
that Stalinism was historically necessary for socialism. And yet, Losurdo’s
defense of Stalin relies not only on distorting the historical record; he also
remains utterly blind to Stalinism’s Thermidorian nature and the damage it
wrought to socialism.
A. KHRUSHCHEV LIED?
During Stalin’s lifetime, Losurdo claims that he was viewed favorably for
his leadership of the Soviet Union. Admiration and respect for Stalin came
not only from communists, but was found across the political spectrum.
For instance, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill tipped his hat to the
Generalissimo. Losurdo says that this all changed in February 1956 at the
Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress. Suddenly, Nikita Khrushchev’s
Secret Speech created a “black legend” that transformed Stalin from a benev-
olent leader into a bloodthirsty tyrant. This single act of Khrushchev shattered
the prestige of international communism and gave a boost to the anticommu-
nists arguments made by Trotsky and other reactionaries. Losurdo concludes
that Khrushchev’s complete repudiation of Stalin cannot withstand honest
scrutiny: “I demonstrate that this total liquidation of Stalin (on the intellectual
as well as the moral side) does not stand up to historical investigation.”3
Losurdo is not the first to observe the flaws of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech.
Marxists as different as Isaac Deutscher, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács
all pointed out how superficial it was for Khrushchev to blame Stalin’s errors
on the personality cult. This left unanswered exactly how the personality cult
could take on such monstrous forms in the USSR. To answer that question
required a Marxist analysis of how the Soviet Union itself made Stalinism
possible. Yet this would have indicted the Communist Party as a whole in
Stalin’s crimes. As a member of the nomenklatura, Khrushchev could not
do that without destroying the legitimacy of the party. Instead, Khrushchev
adopted a different course whereby he upheld the basic structure of the Soviet
system while blaming Stalin alone for its excesses and errors. For example,
Khrushchev does not condemn the purges as such. He has no principled
objection to the repression of Trotskyists and other Oppositionists, but only
faults Stalin for targeting loyal party members, i.e., other Stalinists. This
moralistic and shallow method allows Khrushchev to absolve the Communist
Party of any blame for Stalinism.
Domenico Losurdo 285
If Losurdo was simply pointing out those flaws of Khrushchev’s Secret

Speech, then there is no reason to object. However, this is not what he is
doing. Even more than Khrushchev, Losurdo cannot offer a critical balance
sheet on Stalin. In place of the “black legend,” he only sees a white knight.
It would not be a stretch to say that Losurdo veers into outright denial when
it comes to Stalin’s crimes since he rejects the Khrushchev Report in toto. As
proof, one can observe his long-standing personal and political relationship
with Grover Furr. The literature professor at Montclair State University is a
longtime apologist when it comes to Stalin. Furr is the author of The Murder
of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm (2013),
where he employs the same methods as Vyshinsky by blaming Kirov’s mur-
der on a Trotskyite-Zinovievite conspiracy. In a blurb for the Kirov book,
Losurdo praised Furr’s research:
Grover Furr moves with perfect ease with the Russian language and Russian
archives. Without being intimidated by political correctness his research and
documentation is precise, patient, meticulous. He has already proven beyond
a shadow of a doubt that, as the title of one of his previous books states,
Khrushchev Lied. Now he confronts the question of Kirov’s murder. The Soviet
tragedy begins with the “Kirov Affair.” This is one more reason to reconsider it,
in the light of the important novelties in the book by Grover Furr.4
In 2011, Furr wrote his work on the Secret Speech entitled Khrushchev Lied:
The Evidence that Every ‘Revelation’ of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) ‘Crimes’ in
Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous ‘Secret Speech’ to the 20th Party Congress of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, Is Probably
False. A mere reading of this laborious title leaves one with the (correct)
impression that Furr dismisses Khrushchev out of hand. Furr uses conspira-
torial logic to make his case. Losurdo not only fails to see through Furr’s
charade, but even wrote the preface to the Italian edition of Khrushchev
Lied! Here, he compares Furr’s rescue of Stalin from Khrushchev’s “black
legend” to Babeuf’s salvaging of Robespierre’s reputation from the slanders
of Thermidor:
Against Stalin the dominant ideology quietly brandishes the most contradictory
statements and “revelations,” as long as they are the most infamous. That is
why we must salute the work of Grover Furr, who is perfectly at ease with the
Russian language and archives. Without being intimidated by the “politically
correct” it suggests today a sort of surreal novel no less phantasmagoric than the
one invented by the Thermidorians when they accused Robespierre of having
wanted to marry the daughter of Louis XVI to seize the throne of the Bourbons.
Behind the “Secret Report” we glimpse a political struggle on which we need to
286 Appendix
investigate further; but from now on, thanks to the work of Furr, historians will
be able to devote themselves to this work finally free from baseless legends.5
While Losurdo’s praise for Furr is shocking, it is worth noting the political
differences between them. Compared to Losurdo, Furr is a “left” Stalinist
who believes in immediately abolishing markets and instituting full commu-
nism. As a “right” Stalinist, Losurdo says that communists must forget about
abolishing markets and bourgeois social relations since that is foolishly uto-
pian. In general, Losurdo’s writing on Stalinism is poor, but it does not reach
the same level of apologetics and pseudo-scholarship found in Furr. However,
it does speak volumes about Losurdo’s own political and scholarly blind spots
that he is willing to associate with someone like Furr.
B. THE GREAT TERROR
One of Losurdo’s claims is that the Bolsheviks faced continued threats from
external and, most especially, internal opponents. He notes that following
1917 that the Bolsheviks fought three civil wars: the first one against the
counterrevolutionary White Armies; the second against the kulaks in the
collectivization of agriculture; and the last was Trotsky’s plots. Due to the
Dialectic of Saturn, the inner-party struggles devolved into purges and coun-
terrevolutionary plots to overthrow Soviet power.
When it comes to the third civil war, Losurdo says that this conflict pos-
sessed all the ferocity of a religious war between true believers. He notes that
this was a conflict between two Bolsheviks. On the one side was Stalin, who
had to safeguard the Soviet Union by eliminating all internal threats. On the
opposite side was Trotsky, the former Red Army commander, who was so
convinced that Stalin betrayed the revolution that he began a civil war: “Yes,
it was Trotsky who declared that the struggle against the Stalinist ‘bureau-
cratic oligarchy’ precluded a peaceful solution. . . . At a certain point, faced
with the radical novelty of the national and international context, Trotsky was
(wrongly) convinced that there had been a counter-revolution in Moscow and
acted accordingly.”6 Losurdo claims that in the chaos of the purges, foreign
powers such as Nazi Germany found common cause with Trotsky’s efforts to
destabilize the USSR.
It should come as no surprise to learn that Losurdo accepts the claims of the
Moscow Trials at face value. He genuinely believes that Zinoviev, Kamenev,
Bukharin, and others were guilty of conspiracy and led clandestine terrorist
organizations of spies and wreckers. Losurdo says that the Oppositionists hid
their subversive plans behind Aesopian language. For example, he accuses
Bukharin of being two-faced when he publicly professed his loyalty to the
party while privately plotting Stalin’s downfall: “[Bukharin] himself secretly

revealed in 1936―harbored a profound ‘hatred’ toward Stalin, in fact, the
sort of ‘absolute’ hatred that is reserved for a ‘demon.’ While he expressed
himself like this in private, Bukharin oversaw Izvestia, the newspaper of the
Soviet government. Are we dealing with obvious incoherence? Not from the
point of view of the Bolshevik leader, who continued to combine legal and
illegal work, with the aim of toppling a regime that he considered detestable,
and who valued another of Lenin’s lessons.”7 Moreover, Losurdo claims that
Trotsky was ultimately serving Nazi interests with his calls for political revo-
lution in the USSR:
While the flames of the Second World War burn ever higher, destined as well to
reach the Soviet Union according to the same prediction by Trotsky, he contin-
ues making declarations and statements that are anything but reassuring. . . . It
is quite understandable that the “bureaucracy” or the “oligarchy,” branded as the
“principal enemy,” is convinced that the opposition, if not at the direct service of
the enemy, is in any case ready from the start to follow-up its actions.8
Losurdo concludes that Stalin was correct to paint Trotsky, Bukharin, and
other Oppositionists as traitors, criminals, spies, and wreckers. Their defeat
in the third civil war ensured the survival of the Soviet Union.
Based on his claims, Losurdo appears to believe that this third civil war
was deliberately planned by Trotsky. He gives that impression by stating that
Trotsky’s violent rhetoric and actions created the atmosphere that led to the
assassination of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in December 1934. This
event began the purges since it supposedly gave credibility to Stalin’s fears
that a wide-ranging conspiracy was afoot: “Trotsky appeals to the Soviet
youth, who have already started to spread fear among the members of the
ruling elite, calling on them to join the new revolution that draws near. . . . As
you can see, the attack against Kirov evokes the spectre of civil war among
the forces that had toppled the old regime.”9
While no serious scholar believes there was a far-ranging “Trotskyite-
Zinovievite” conspiracy, many details surrounding Kirov’s death are still
unclear. For instance, the motives of Leonid Nikolaev, Kirov’s assassin. Did
he kill Kirov in a desperate protest against bureaucratic abuses as Trotsky
claimed? Was Kirov killed as part of a larger plot by Stalin? Both Khrushchev
and Robert Conquest have argued that Stalin planned Kirov’s death as a
pretext to remove oppositionists and consolidate power in his hands. Recent
studies in the Soviet archives have not turned up anything conclusive either.
No proof has ever appeared to substantiate accusations that Stalin orches-
trated the whole affair. Stalin’s biographer, Oleg Khlevniuk says:
288 Appendix
The idea that Stalin was behind Kirov’s murder has all the hallmarks of a con-
spiracy theory. Such theories tend to rest on the idea that if an event benefits
some sinister person, he must have brought it about. They tend to deny the pos-
sibility of random occurrences and ignore the fact that chance events happen all
the time. The idea that Stalin conspired to kill Kirov has received far too much
attention. Even if he did have a hand in Kirov’s death, this possibility hardly
changes our understanding of him or his era. In the annals of the dictator’s
crimes, Kirov’s murder would have been one of the least heinous.10
Based on the current evidence, a far more likely and reasonable explanation
about Kirov’s assassination was that it happened as a matter of chance (as
Victor Serge insinuated in The Case of Comrade Tulayev). Contra Losurdo’s
claims, history is not so well-put together that it operates according to a mas-
ter plan set in motion by either Trotsky or Stalin.
When it comes to the evidence of Oppositionist conspiracies against the
USSR, Losurdo’s sources are dubious at best and grotesque at worst. He
cites the ex-communist Ruth Fischer as evidence for Trotsky’s clandestine
activities. Yet she provides no documentation and is generally considered to
be an unreliable source.11 The same goes for the account of another former
communist, Jules Humbert-Droz, who wrote in his memoirs that Bukharin
supported individual terrorism against Stalin.12 Do serious conspirators act in
such sloppy ways? Among Losurdo’s other sources for Trotsky’s collabora-
tion with foreign powers are the Italian fascist Curzio Malaparte and Nazi
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.13 Should one truly believe fascist
claims about communists without corroborating evidence? The fact is that
Losurdo ignores long-standing and vocal pronouncements by Trotsky that it
was necessary to defend the USSR from imperialism. Trotsky broke with his
followers such as Shachtman and Burnham who refused to do that. Lastly, if a
vast “Trotskyite-Nazi” conspiracy truly existed, then some physical evidence
for it would surely have been found in the past eighty years in the archives of
Germany or Japan. The former was actually occupied by the Red Army, who
would have uncovered documentation if it existed. Yet no evidence exists
because these conspiracies were completely fabricated. Instead of proof,
Losurdo pieces “evidence” together from anecdotes, gossip, and rumors that
amount to nothing.
The only evidence that Losurdo can use are the confessions from defen-
dants at the Moscow Trials. However, it is well-known that the Soviet judicial
system employed the following methods of coercion during the Great Terror:
solitary confinement, punishing the family of suspects, and torture. It is per-
fectly reasonable to doubt the validity of confessions when such practices
are widespread. Take for instance, Nikolai Bukharin. He was not physically
tortured, but his family was threatened with harm. At his trial, Bukharin did
confess to general charges of conspiracy, but denied taking part in any spe-
cific criminal acts. Stephen Cohen, Bukharin’s biographer, explains that his
strategy was meant to expose the trial as a frame-up:
Bukharin’s plan, as another writer has pointed out, was to turn his trial into a
counter-trial (a well-known practice of Russian revolutionaries) of the Stalinist
regime, and his own indictment into an indictment of Stalin as the executioner
of Bolshevism. Briefly stated, his tactic would be to make sweeping confessions
that he was “politically responsible” for everything, thereby at once saving his
family and underlining his symbolic role, while at the same time flatly denying
or subtly disproving his complicity in any actual crime.14
This is not to say that Losurdo is completely wrong in characterizing the

purges as a civil war. Kirov’s death represented an opportunity for Stalin,
who took advantage of it by striking against his enemies, settling old scores,
and eliminating any other suspected threats. The violence of the terror was
ferocious even though one side was completely disarmed. Trotsky went so far
as describing the purge as a preventive civil war by the bureaucracy to stop
the formation of an organized communist opposition. Losurdo even favorably
quotes the following passage from the Trotskyist historian Vadim Rogovin:
“In actual fact, the Moscow Trials were not a senseless and cold-blooded
crime, but Stalin’s counterblow in the sharpest of political battles.”15 Losurdo
is correct to see the purges as a civil war, he just finds himself on the
wrong side.
As a result, Losurdo cannot see the Thermidorian logic behind the purges.
The trials had all the hallmarks of a Thermidorian amalgam where contradic-
tory forces were grouped together in criminal plots. By weaving together rev-
olutionaries and criminals, the process of amalgamation attributed to the first
group the motives of the second. Amalgams were common in France after the
downfall of Robespierre when the ruling Directory condemned Jacobins and
royalists as co-criminals. During the Great Terror, Stalin accused Trotskyists,
Right Oppositionists, fascists, nationalists, etc., of conspiring together against
Soviet power. According to Trotsky: “The Thermidoreans and Bonapartists
of the Great French Revolution hounded and condemned all genuine revolu-
tionists—the Jacobins—as ‘royalists’ and agents of Pitt’s reactionary British
government. Stalin hasn’t invented anything new. He has only carried the
system of political frame-up to its extreme expression. Lies, slander, persecu-
tion, false accusations, juridical comedies flow inexorably from the position
of the usurping bureaucracy in Soviet society.”16 Stalin’s resort to amalgams
was necessary to discredit any opponents by falsifying their motives as purely
criminal and not involving principled politics. Since Trotsky was the most
well-known opposition figure with a clearly defined communist program,
290 Appendix
using a Thermidorian amalgam was how Stalin painted him as a fascist, a

criminal, and an archenemy of the Soviet Union.
While Losurdo cannot see it, the Thermidorian nature of the purges was
clearly recognized at the time by both communists and anticommunists. One
old Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev told his NKVD interrogator: “You are now
observing Thermidor in a pure form. The French Revolution taught us a good
lesson, but we weren’t able to put it to use. We didn’t know how to protect
our revolution from Thermidor. That is our greatest mistake, and history will
condemn us for it.”17 Outside of the USSR, Tsarist émigrés celebrated the
trials for riding Russia of international Jews and Bolsheviks who had ruined
the Motherland. After the first trial in August 1936, the monarchist paper
Vozrozhdenye dedicated the following poem to Stalin:
We thank thee, Stalin!

Sixteen scoundrels,
Sixteen butchers of the fatherland,
Have been gathered to their forefathers!
Today the sky looks blue,
Thou hast repaid us for the sorrows of so many
years! . . .
But why only sixteen?
Give us forty,
Give us hundreds,
Thousands,
Make a bridge across the Moscow river,
A bridge without towers or beams,
A bridge of Soviet carrion.
—And add thy carcass to the rest!18
After the final show trial in March 1938, Mussolini saluted Stalin for aban-
doning Bolshevism: “Stalin has secretly become a Fascist. . . . Stalin has ren-
dered a praiseworthy service to fascism by tossing out its declared enemies,
however impotent they may be.”19
As part of its Thermidorian nature, the bureaucracy did not hesitate to stoke
up anti-Semitism during the purges. At the first trial, ten out of sixteen defen-
dants were Jews, at the second eight out of seventeen. In the Soviet press,
Jewish-sounding names were used to describe the accused even if the figures
were not known by them. For example, Bronstein not Trotsky; Radomislyski
not Zinoviev; Rozenfeld not Kamenev. The bureaucracy made the cosmopoli-
tan and urban Jews into convenient scapegoats for popular rage against the
system. Trotsky noted that the Stalinist embrace of anti-Semitism was noth-
ing less than Thermidorian: “The physical extermination of the older genera-
tion of the Bolsheviks is, for every person who can think, an incontrovertible
expression of the Thermidorian reaction, and in its most advanced stage at

that. History has never yet seen an example when the reaction following the
revolutionary upsurge was not accompanied by the most unbridled chauvin-
istic passions, anti-Semitism among them.”20
Something ignored by Losurdo is that the preventive civil war also
extended into the Communist International. In the 1930s, approximately
10,000 foreign communists lived in the Soviet Union, most escaping perse-
cution at home. Now they found themselves consumed by the purges. The
Polish Communist Party was so decimated by arrests that it was dissolved
in 1938. Over eight hundred German Communists were arrested. Nine hun-
dred members of the Yugoslav Communist Party were arrested, only forty
of whom survived the gulag. Ten out of sixteen members of the first central
committee of the Hungarian Communist Party were killed along with eleven
out of twenty people’s commissars of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic,
including its leader Béla Kun. Communists from the Baltic states, Bulgaria,
Mongolia, Japan, Korea, Italy, and Palestine were also heavily repressed
during the purges. According to Vadim Rogovin, the purges inflicted more
damage on Comintern cadres than losses in World War II: “Altogether, more
communists from Eastern Europe were killed in the Soviet Union than died
at home in their own countries during Hitler’s occupation.”21
For Losurdo, the purges had to happen since Trotsky’s revolutionary
utopianism needed to be defeated by Stalin’s pragmatic realism. Yet this
confuses counterrevolutionaries with revolutionaries. Contrary to Losurdo,
the scale and ferocity of the purges was not the mystical Dialectic of Saturn
at work, but a preventive civil war launched by the Stalinist bureaucracy to
destroy a scattered opposition that remained loyal to the ideals of the October
Revolution.
C. TUKHACHEVSKY AND THE RED ARMY PURGES
The Great Purge was not only a preemptive civil war against potential oppo-
sition inside the party and society, but also involved the decapitation of the
Red Army’s officer corps. Losurdo views the Red Army purge as necessary
to stop the rise of a Soviet Bonaparte, i.e., Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky.22
Yet Losurdo misses what was truly behind the Tukhachevsky Affair and the
Red Army purge. These events were closely intertwined with shifts in Soviet
foreign policy vis-à-vis Nazi Germany. Lastly, Losurdo fails to grasp how the
military purges inflicted immense damage on the Soviet Union in the run-up
to World War II.
On the surface, Losurdo appears to be correct. Tukhachevsky is a more
likely candidate for a military dictator than Trotsky ever was. He was a young,
292 Appendix
dashing, and a brilliant Red Army commander who had distinguished himself
in both the Civil War and Soviet-Polish war. During the NEP, Tukhachevsky
was viewed with suspicion by many in the party and was kept under close
surveillance. In the 1930s, Tukhachevsky’s calls for modernization of the Red
Army were condemned by Stalin as a form of “red militarism.”23
Indeed, Losurdo presents a great deal of evidence to back up the claim
that a military coup was on the horizon. He argues that Stalin was rightly
suspicious of plots inside the Red Army: “Was there no cause for alarm?”24
Losurdo notes that Trotsky considered Tukhachevsky to be a potential
Bonapartist. When Tukhachevsky was arrested in 1937, Stalin was told that
Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition had announced that a military revolt was
imminent. This fear precipitated the purge of the Red Army. Another piece of
evidence that Losurdo uses is the account of Czechoslovak President Edvard
Beneš, who passed intelligence to the USSR that the Germans were working
with Tukhachevsky and other officers to oust Stalin. He also cites Churchill’s
account that the Red Army officers were not loyal:
[Beneš] became aware that communications were passing through the Soviet
Embassy in Prague between important personages in Russia and the German
Government. This was a part of the so-called military and Old-Guard
Communist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin and introduce a new régime based
on a pro-German policy. President Beneš lost no time in communicating all he
could find out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless, but perhaps
not needless, military and political purge in Soviet Russia, and the series of
trials. . . . Stalin was conscious of a personal debt to President Beneš; and a
very strong desire to help him and his threatened country against the Nazi peril
animated the Soviet Government.25
Lastly, Losurdo observes that diverse witnesses, who included Isaac Deutscher,
Adolf Hitler, and the American ambassador Joseph Davies all either accepted
Stalin’s version of events about the Tukhachevsky Affair or at least found
them plausible.26
To make sense of the Tukhachevsky Affair requires looking at his propos-
als for modernizing the Red Army. He believed that the next war would be
fought with mechanized forces which would utilize powerful tank formations
and motorized troops. In addition, his new strategic idea of deep operations
depended upon a mechanized Red Army. By deep operations, Tukhachevsky
emphasized not fighting the enemy in a single decisive engagement but con-
ducting coordinated operations against them that combined tanks, aircraft,
and artillery. His innovative approach also introduced the concept of opera-
tional art which connected tactics and strategy. The overarching goal was
to inflict a strategic defeat on the enemy’s logistical support, making their

defense of the front more difficult. As Tukhachevsky said in 1923:
Since it is impossible, with the extended fronts of modern times, to destroy the
enemy’s army at a single blow, we are obliged to try to do this gradually by
operations which will be more costly to the enemy than to ourselves. The more
rapidly we pursue him, the less time we give him to organize his retreat after the
battle, and the more we hasten the disintegration of his armed forces and make
it impossible, or at all events difficult, for him to enter upon another general
engagement. In short, a series of destructive operations conducted on logical
principles and linked together by an uninterrupted pursuit may take the place of
the decisive battle that was the form of engagement in the armies of the past,
which fought on shorter fronts.27
After 1933, Tukhachevsky saw the immediate threat to the USSR lying
in a revanchist Nazi Germany. Following Hitler’s ascension to power,
Tukhachevsky advocated breaking off Red Army–Reichswehr relations
immediately, but he was overruled by Stalin. On March 31, 1935, Pravda
published an article by Tukhachevsky titled “The Military Plans of Today’s
Germany” (originally entitled “The Military Plans of Hitler”), where he
quoted heavily from Mein Kampf, detailing German plans for rearmament
against Western Europe and the Soviet Union. The article caused angry
protests from German officials. Tukhachevsky harshly condemned Stalin’s
conciliatory attitude to Hitler, stating:
Now I see that Stalin is a secret but fanatical, admirer of Hitler. I am not jok-
ing. . . . Hitler would only have to make a step in Stalin’s direction, and our
leader would throw himself with open arms at the fascist. Yesterday when we
were speaking privately, Stalin justified Hitler’s repressions against the Jews by
saying that Hitler was clearing the path of everything that prevented him from
obtaining his goal, and that from the standpoint of his ideas, Hitler was right.
Hitler’s successes impresses losif Vissarionovich [Stalin] too much, and if you
look closely, you will see that he copies the Führer in many ways. . . . And what
is even sadder, there are people who, instead of putting him in his place, look
at him with rapture and hang on his every word as if they expected to hear bril-
liant thoughts.28
None of this seemed to impede Tukhachevsky’s career. In November 1935, at

the relatively young age of forty-two, he was named one of the five Marshals
of the Soviet Union, now the highest rank in the Red Army.
Tukhachevsky continued to speak out about the threat posed by Germany
to the USSR. At the Central Executive Committee of the USSR held on
January 15, 1936, Tukhachevsky emphatically warned about the dangers of
German rearmament, whereas Stalin was far more ambiguous in his remarks.
294 Appendix
Days later, Tukhachevsky and Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov

traveled to the United Kingdom for the funeral of King George V. While
there, he met with members of the British military and influential figures in
the political establishment. Afterward, Tukhachevsky went to France, where
he met General Gamelin, and they inspected military fortifications together.
After returning to the Soviet Union, Tukhachevsky was promoted to first
deputy defense commissar and made head of the Red Army’s newly formed
Administration of Combat Readiness. In Germany, he was regarded as one of
the most influential and dangerous figures in the Red Army.
Later in 1936, Tukhachevsky spoke with General Isserson, director of
the General Staff Academy and his colleague Pavel Vakulich about the Red
Army and future conflicts. Tukhachevsky told them that the Soviet Union’s
main enemy was the Third Reich and explained what it would take to defeat
a German Blitzkrieg:
As for the Blitzkrieg which is so propagandised by the Germans, this is directed

towards an enemy who doesn’t want to and won’t fight it out. If the Germans
meet an opponent who stands up and fights and takes the offensive himself,
that would give a different aspect to things. The struggle will be bitter and pro-
tracted; by its very nature it would induce great fluctuations in the front on this
or that side and in great depth. In the final resort all would depend on who had
the greater moral fibre and who at the close of operations disposed of opera-
tional reserves in depth.29
By the following year, Tukhachevsky found himself embroiled in the

purges. At the second show trial in January 1937, his name was ominously
mentioned by Karl Radek. That spring, the NKVD began building a case
against Tukhachevsky and other officers. Rumors swirled in France and
Czechoslovakia that a miliary coup was imminent in the Soviet Union.
Nothing seemed amiss for Tukhachevsky until May 4, when he was deemed
too ill to travel to Britain as part of the Soviet delegation for the coronation
of King George VI. Several weeks later, Tukhachevsky and his family were
abruptly arrested. Now in custody, Tukhachevsky was tortured and confessed
his involvement in a Trotskyist conspiracy acting on behalf of Germany. He
was so badly beaten that bloodstains appeared on the signed confession.30
After a secret trial in June, Tukhachevsky and other senior military officers
were executed.
All the sources used by Losurdo claim that Tukhachevsky was actu-
ally planning a coup d’état. It may be the case that figures like Churchill
and Beneš genuinely believed Stalin’s version of the Tukhachevsky Affair.
However, what they accepted was an elaborate frame-up. The evidence
against Tukhachevsky was fabricated by German intelligence and discreetly
passed to the Czechs, prompting Beneš to personally inform the Soviet

government.31 The Germans were counting on Stalin’s paranoia to remove
the best minds in the Red Army. Yet none of this “evidence” was used at
Tukhachevsky’s trial. This means that one must look elsewhere for why the
military purge happened.
There were other reasons for Stalin to fear Tukhachevsky and the Red
Army officers. First: many officers had worked closely with Trotsky and had
immense respect for him as a military commander. Yet this did not translate
into political support for the Left Opposition, and no evidence exists of any
clandestine contact between Trotsky and Tukhachevsky in regards to a mili-
tary coup. Second: the Red Army was one of the few organized forces in the
Soviet Union that could conceivably wrest power away from Stalin. Third:
Tukhachevsky himself was a popular figure and an independent thinker who
was often at loggerheads with Stalin on military strategy.
While these three reasons likely informed Stalin’s thinking, there is a far
more plausible rationale, which was the struggle over Soviet foreign policy.
Throughout the 1930s, the Communist Party had no single approach to for-
eign policy, but there were at least two camps in contention. The first camp
consisted of proponents of collective security. This involved a military alli-
ance between the Soviet Union, Britain, and France to contain fascist aggres-
sion. The most prominent supporter of collective security was the foreign
commissar, Maxim Litvinov. A second camp included Stalin and Molotov,
who were open to a reproachment with Nazi Germany. Stalin’s remarks at
the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934 were directed just as much
to the advocates of collective security as Hitler: “Of course, we are far from
being enthusiastic about the fascist regime in Germany. But it is not a ques-
tion of fascism here, if only for the reason that fascism in Italy, for example,
has not prevented the U.S.S.R. from establishing the best relations with that
country.”32 Even as the USSR pursued collective security, the popular front,
and intervened in the Spanish Civil War, the back-and-forth over foreign pol-
icy continued. As a committed anti-fascist, Tukhachevsky was a supporter of
collective security and bound to reject any reconciliation with Nazi Germany.
Along with his high-ranking position in the Red Army, that may have been
reason enough for Stalin to purge him.
Others inside the party who shared Tukhachevsky’s pro-Western posi-
tion were also purged. Among them was Nikolai Bukharin, who feared
Nazi Germany and supported collective security. As suspicion fell on
Tukhachevsky, Bukharin was arrested. At his own trial, Bukharin was
accused of working with Germany, Trotsky, and Tukhachevsky to overthrow
Stalin. After Bukharin’s death, his widow Anna Larina said that the NKVD
interrogators taunted her about Tukhachevsky’s failure to rescue her hus-
band: “You thought that Yakir and Tukhachevsky would save your Bukharin!
296 Appendix
But we do good work. That’s why the commanders didn’t succeed!”33 The
purge of figures like Bukharin and Tukhachevsky made it easier for Stalin to
conclude a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in 1939 without facing any
organized opposition.
The death of Tukhachevsky was also the catalyst for a wholesale purge of
the Red Army in 1937–1938. From a total of 144,000 officers, at least 33,000
were removed from their posts. A total of 9,500 were imprisoned and another
7,000 were executed. The higher ranks were hit the hardest by the purge. Out
of 767 high-ranking commanders, a minimum of 503 were imprisoned or
shot. Among the 186 highest ranked officers, 154 were executed for a total
of 90 percent. These included three out of the five marshals of the Soviet
Union: Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Vasily Blyukher, and Aleksandr Yegorov.34 At
a stroke, Stalin deprived the Red Army of its best talent.
The purge also meant that Tukhachevsky’s ideas on deep operations were
now viewed as heretical and his writings were destroyed. New officers were
fearful of showing either resourcefulness or independence. They kept their
heads down and conformed. As the historian Moshe Lewin observed, the
purges ensured that the Red Army was not ready for the German invasion: “In
the summer of 1941, 75 per cent of field officers and 70 per cent of political
commissars had been in post for less than a year, so that the core of the army
lacked the requisite experience in commanding larger units.”35
For the Germans, the results of the Red Army purge were exactly what
they wanted. Joseph Goebbels speculated that Stalin must be brain damaged,
and Hitler was positively gleeful. In January 1938, the German General Staff
prepared a report on the Red Army’s capabilities, and noted its poor opera-
tional state:
After Tukhachevsky and a number of generals had been shot in the summer of
1937, only a few people remain from the military leaders. According to all avail-
able data at the present time, the middle and senior commanders appear to be the
weakest link. Independence and initiative are absent. In battle, this category of
commanders adapt with difficulty to the conditions of changing circumstances
and crisis situations.36
This was an apt description of the Red Army that the Germans faced three
short years later. Only under fire would the Red Army relearn the theory
of deep operations, which contributed greatly to the decisive victories at
Stalingrad, Kursk, and Bagration.
Contrary to Losurdo’s claims, the Red Army purge did not ward off a
potential Bonaparte since no such threat existed. Mikhail Tukhachevsky was
a dedicated soldier of the revolution, a committed anti-fascist, and a gifted
strategist. His execution set off a snowball effect that beheaded the Red Army
and nearly doomed the Soviet Union.
D. COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
When it comes to how the Communist International performed, Losurdo

is either silent or evades any real discussion. For instance, he says nothing
about how the Third Period led to the destruction of the German Communist
Party in 1933. Instead, he uses that moment to criticize Trotsky’s response
of calling for a political revolution against Stalin: “Hitler’s rise to power for
Trotsky doesn’t mean that unity is necessary, in the aim of confronting the
enormous danger which looms, starting from Germany; it means that they
can’t stop half-way in the struggle against a power, Stalinism, which had led
to the defeat of the German and international proletariat.”37
Losurdo does not spend any time discussing why Trotsky reacted so
harshly. From 1930 to 1933, Trotsky wrote article after article warning
German Communists of the danger posed by Nazism and the need for a
united front to stop them. His cries were ignored. When Hitler triumphed, the
Comintern did not offer a critical balance sheet, but declared that their line
had been correct all along: “Having heard Comrade Heckert’s report on the
situation in Germany, the presidium of the ECCI states that the political line
and the organizational policy followed by the CC of the Communist Party
of Germany, with Comrade Thaelmann [sic] at its head, up to the Hitlerite
coup, and at the moment when it occurred, was completely correct.”38 From
that, Trotsky concluded that the Comintern and the Soviet Union had become
unreformable. Yet Losurdo provides no critical reflection on those events.
Regarding the adoption of the popular front in 1935, Losurdo states that
the “strategy had its costs.”39 He notes that the popular front failed in its
objectives since no anti-Nazi alliance was formed with Britain and France
against Hitler. That is certainly true, but not the whole story by far. Losurdo
completely ignores how the popular front acted as a brake on proletarian and
revolutionary struggles. In the United States, the Communist Party worked
tooth and nail to keep labor militancy within what was deemed acceptable to
FDR and the Democratic Party. In France, the Communist Party held back the
strike wave in May–June 1936 in deference to their moderate socialist allies.
The most damaging results of the popular front occurred in the Spanish
Civil War, during which a social revolution was restrained by the Communist
Party to serve the interests of Soviet foreign policy. In Spain, there was
a spillover of the purges from the USSR when radical anarchists and the
POUM were deemed fifth columnists who must be eliminated. According to a
Comintern directive addressed to Spanish communists: “the final destruction
298 Appendix
of the Trotskyists must be achieved, exposing them to the masses as a Fascist

secret service carrying out provocations in the interests of Hitler and General
Franco, attempting to split the Popular Front, conducting a slanderous cam-
paign against the Soviet Union, a secret service actively aiding Fascism in
Spain.”40 Not a single word on this comes from Losurdo.
Losurdo is unable to adequately explain the popular front’s impact on
anti-imperialist struggles. He says that communists putting anti-colonialism
on the backburner was a necessary evil to achieve collective security. Yet
he offers no analysis of how this compromise discredited the Communist
Parties in Britain, France, and colonial countries since they supported impe-
rial overlords instead of national liberation. For example, Losurdo is silent
about the French Communist Party’s defense of the French Empire and how
they condemned anti-colonial revolts as pro-fascist. Instead, Losurdo laments
that the popular front “strengthened the opposition and Trotskyite agitation”
in the colonies.41
In the end, Losurdo is reduced to explaining these zigzags of the Comintern
as regrettable necessities because he cannot grasp their Thermidorian logic.
Since Losurdo accepts Stalinist “realism” as a given, he cannot comprehend
how the Comintern’s abandonment of world revolution flowed directly from
the line of socialism in one country.
E. NAZI-SOVIET PACT
Losurdo is correct to blame the failures of collective security largely on

Britain and France. The historical record shows that the British ruling
class viewed Nazism positively and hoped that Hitler would save Europe
from Bolshevism. The French bourgeoisie were little better. Despite the
Soviet-French Pact of 1935, the military alliance proved to be a dead let-
ter. In the 1930s, France itself was politically polarized with a large fascist
movement that threatened to overturn the Third Republic. When Léon Blum’s
popular front government was elected in 1936, a common saying among
conservatives was “Better Hitler Than Blum.” Or as they put it more crudely:
“Better Hitler than a Jew.”
At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Britain and France formed the
Non-Intervention Committee to stop the flow of arms to either side. This
neutrality was a farce since the Non-Intervention Committee looked the
other way while German and Italian aid poured into Nationalist Spain.
Moreover, British conservatives favored a Nationalist victory since it would
crush the reds.
British and French preference for fascism over communism was readily on
display at the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Even though British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was willing to accommodate Hitler’s

claims on the Sudetenland, he feared Germany moving against the West. To
forestall this, Chamberlain offered a quid pro quo to the Führer: he encour-
aged Germany to move east against the Soviet Union, and Britain would not
intervene. The translator at the September 23 meeting recorded the following
exchange between Hitler and Chamberlain:
at 2:00 in the morning Chamberlain and Hitler took leave from one another in
a completely friendly tone after having had, with my assistance, an eye to eye
conversation. During the meeting, with words that came from his heart, Hitler
thanked Chamberlain for his efforts for peace. He remarked that the solution
of the Sudeten question is the last big problem which remains to be treated.
Hitler also spoke about a German-Anglo rapprochement and cooperation. It
was clearly noticeable that it was important for him to have a good relation with
the Englishman. He went back to his old tune: “Between us there should be no
conflict,” he said to Chamberlain, “we will not stand in the way of your pursuit
of your non-European interests and you may without harm let us have a free
hand on the European continent in Central and South-East Europe. Sometime
we will have to solve the colonial question; but this has time, and war is not to
be considered in this case.” (Author’s translation)42
Chamberlain found nothing objectionable in Hitler’s remarks. Britain showed

that it was willing to turn a blind eye to the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe
if it meant the destruction of the hated Soviet Union.
Despite all this, there were efforts by the USSR to reach a military agree-
ment with Britain and France that lasted into the summer of 1939. However,
the Western powers were not willing to commit to any firm agreement with
Stalin. The Soviets on their end were rightfully suspicious about Western
good faith after Munich. The Soviet Union kept its options open and put out
feelers to Germany. Only in August 1939 did the USSR finally commit to a
Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler. Losurdo is correct that the Soviets reached
their agreement with Hitler long after the West had already done so:
thanks to the direct or passive complicity of the Western powers, inclined

to direct the Third Reich’s sights and ambitions against the homeland of the
October Revolution; to its east, the Soviet Union sees the pressure applied by
Japan on its eastern borders. Thus emerges the danger of an invasion and war
on two fronts: It’s only at this moment that Moscow begins moving toward a
pact of non-aggression with Germany, noting the failure of the popular front
strategy.43
By reaching a modus vivendi with Hitler, Stalin’s realpolitik was no worse

than any other capitalist politician of his time. Losurdo may find it convenient
300 Appendix
to end discussion here, but Marxists cannot. The Pact was a huge blow for
communists and anti-fascists. They found something truly repellant about the
Soviet Union carving up spheres of influence with Nazi Germany under the
banner of proletarian internationalism.
Losurdo’s defense of Stalinist “realism” means he upholds the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a pragmatic measure by the USSR to gain space
and time. However, he does not look at what this policy meant for the cause
of socialism. Losurdo largely passes over the Soviet annexation of eastern
Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states. Geoffrey Roberts, a historian
whom Losurdo quotes favorably on Stalin’s military leadership, is not silent
about what happened: “Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, 400,000
ethnic Poles were arrested, deported and/or executed; among those shot were
20,000 Polish POWs—victims of the infamous ‘Katyn massacre’ of April–
May 1940. The Red Army’s occupation of the Baltic States in summer 1940
led to the deportation of several hundred thousand Estonians, Latvians and
Lithuanians.”44 These annexations may have created a buffer zone between
the USSR and the Germans, but at what cost for socialism?
The poor performance of the Red Army in its 1939–1940 Winter War
with Finland is not discussed by Losurdo. True, the Winter War was a Soviet
victory, but due to poor leadership and high casualties for the Red Army, it
was largely seen as a symbolic victory for Finland. After the Winter War,
Hitler said that the USSR was a “tenacious adversary,” but that the Red
Army was “without leadership.”45 While the USSR did undertake needed
military reforms after the war, the conflict severely damaged the Red Army’s
reputation.
There is one Soviet action during the Non-Aggression Pact that Losurdo
does not mention. That is the handover to the Third Reich of at least five
hundred German and Austrian anti-fascists and communists who were liv-
ing in Soviet exile. Many of them later died in Nazi concentration camps. It
should be emphasized that there was no provision in the Pact for extradition,
but this was done freely by the USSR with no coercion from Hitler. The Nazis
were delighted to receive these prisoners and asked the Soviets to send them
more. Bini Adamczak describes the cynical nature of the prisoner exchange
as follows: “The Nazis give the numbers, the Soviets supply the names. The
anti-fascists are sacrificed not according to some overarching principle of
political calculus nor as currency in an exchange but rather as a kind of gift.”46
Losurdo claims that the Pact gave Stalin the time he needed to prepare
the Red Army for war. However, Stalin was gambling on a prolonged war
between the Western powers and Nazi Germany. In this regard, he severely
underestimated Germany’s offensive capabilities and overestimated France’s
military strength. When France fell after just six weeks in May–June 1940,
this completely upset Stalin’s calculus. Ultimately, the strategy of gaining

time had failed in less than a year.
The Wehrmacht victories in the West were due in no small part to Soviet
shipments of needed resources to Germany. Three major economic agree-
ments were signed in August 1939, February 1940, and January 1941 that
resulted in a tenfold increase of trade between the two countries. These
agreements enabled Germany to bypass the British blockade by receiving
resources from the USSR. Until Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union
accounted for the bulk of Germany’s overseas trade. Without these supplies,
the Germans would not have been able to defeat France in 1940 or launch
their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. As Edward E. Ericson said in his
study on Soviet and German economic relations:
Without Soviet deliveries of these four major items (oil, grain, manganese,
and rubber), however, Germany barely could have attacked the Soviet Union,
let alone come close to victory. Germany’s stockpiles of oil, manganese, and
grain would have been completely exhausted by the late summer of 1941. And
Germany’s rubber supply would have run out half a year earlier. Even with
more intense rationing and synthetic production, the Reich surely would have
lacked the reserves necessary for a major campaign in the East along the lines
of Operation Barbarossa. In other words, Hitler had been almost completely
dependent on Stalin to provide him the resources he needed to attack the Soviet
Union. It was no wonder that Hitler repeatedly insisted Germany fulfill the
terms of the economic treaties. He could not conquer any Soviet territory until
he first received enough Soviet raw materials.47
The last shipment of Soviet supplies reached Germany only hours before
Barbarossa began. Despite the benefits of trade with the Soviet Union, the
Germans believed that they could extract more raw materials through con-
quest. On balance, Hitler was the clear beneficiary of the Non-Aggression Pact.
Losurdo also dismisses accusations from Khrushchev that Stalin left the
USSR unprepared for war. He cites Stalin’s accelerated war preparations that
included calling up reservists and fortifying the frontiers. By June 1941, nearly
three million Red Army soldiers were on the western borders. However, the
troops had abandoned their old fortifications for new forward positions. None
of these defenses were complete by June 1941. This meant that the bulk of the
Red Army was not only within striking distance of the Wehrmacht, but also
dangerously exposed. The largest concentration of Red Army forces was in
the southwest, where they were expecting the main German advance. Instead,
the main thrust of German tanks came in the north.48 In other words, Stalin
left the Red Army extremely vulnerable.
When it comes to Khrushchev’s claims that repeated warnings about
a German invasion were ignored, Losurdo once again rushes to Stalin’s
302 Appendix
defense. Hitler had always considered the Non-Aggression Pact to be a

momentary truce. He believed that Judeo-Bolshevism and the Soviets were
the greatest enemies of the Reich. German plans for the invasion had been
approved by December 1940. Soviet intelligence was among the best in the
world and its agents got wind of the plans before the New Year. Around the
same time, the famed spy Richard Sorge, sent a report to the USSR about the
planned invasion. As the date for the German attack grew closer, more and
more reports from Soviet intelligence poured into the Kremlin. However,
Stalin believed that all these reports were just provocations. Stalin was deter-
mined not to be drawn into a war and made continued efforts to appease the
Germans and convince them of the Soviet Union’s peaceful intentions.
In the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa, three million Wehrmacht troops—
one of the largest land forces ever assembled—were amassed on the Soviet
frontier. They were a force impossible to be missed. The Germans used the
excuse that these troops were stationed there to stay out of range of RAF
bombers. The Germans also violated Soviet borders on at least three hundred
occasions, prompting diplomatic protests with no result. In one instance,
a Junkers 52 transport plane went through Soviet air defenses and flew all
the way to Moscow. The plane was allowed to land and was refueled by the
Soviets before departing. Losurdo has nothing to say on this.
The British heard about German preparations and proceeded to tell Soviet
ambassador Ivan Maisky four times about them. Maisky relayed this infor-
mation back to Moscow, but it had no effect. Two highly placed sources in
Luftwaffe headquarters and the German economics ministry also sent back
reports to the USSR detailing evidence of the coming attack. On June 21,
the day before the invasion, defecting German troops said an attack was
mere hours away. Zhukov and Timoshenko wanted to use this information to
order a general mobilization. Still nothing happened. When German troops
crossed over the frontier, Stalin expressed doubts that this was actually war:
“Couldn’t this just be a provocation by German generals? . . . Hitler surely
doesn’t know about this.”49
The Germans planned to destroy the bulk of Soviet forces in a series of
encirclements, denying them any opportunity to retreat. On the opening day,
nearly 1,200 Soviet aircraft were lost. Red Army organization, command, and
discipline practically collapsed. Some Soviet units were ordered not to attack.
In just a matter of days, the Wehrmacht was able to inflict devastating losses
on the Red Army and advanced deep into the Soviet Union. As opposed to
Losurdo’s claims, it was Stalin’s “realism” that created the conditions for the
disaster of June 22.
F. WAR LEADER
Losurdo denies that Stalin was an incompetent military leader in World War
II. He says the following about Khrushchev’s negative characterization: “It is
clear that the portrait of Stalin drawn here is a caricature: how did the USSR
manage to defeat Hitler under a leader who was both criminal and a fool?”50
In Losurdo’s view, Stalin was an exemplary statesman, full of confidence
and fierce resolve, who saved the Soviet Union from annihilation. Since the
Soviet Union emerged victorious in the war, and Stalin’s name is tied to that
triumph, assessing his wartime leadership is complicated. However, it is still
necessary to ask: was the Red Army’s victory due to Stalin or despite him?
There is an important falsification about Stalin and the war that Losurdo
does clear up. For example, it is not true that Stalin was despondent for days
following the German invasion. From the earliest days of the invasion, he
took an active part in military planning. Yet there were terrible results stem-
ming from his involvement. In the first year, Stalin ordered constant military
offensives by the Red Army against the Wehrmacht to wear down enemy
resistance. As a result, he bears responsibility for the following: the military
failures in 1941 that ended with the capture of millions of Soviet soldiers; the
advance of the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow and Leningrad; and the
failure to halt German offensives in July 1942.
The historical verdict on Stalin’s military leadership is mixed, with some
such as Geoffrey Roberts and Isaac Deutscher paying him tribute. They claim
that Stalin learned from his mistakes and became a capable military com-
mander. However, Roberts and Deutscher give Stalin too much credit. It was
Red Army Generals who displayed far more tactical and strategic acumen.
What Stalin did correctly was let the Red Army generals do their job. Over
time, Stalin grew to trust his officers and encouraged them to take initiative
on the battlefield. This stood in marked contrast to the Wehrmacht, where
Hitler distrusted his generals and increasingly interfered with military plan-
ning. According to military historian David Glantz, Hitler and Stalin essen-
tially swapped leadership styles as the war continued:
As the war dragged on and Germany lost the initiative, the two heads of state
traded leadership styles. Hitler became increasingly intolerant of what he con-
sidered subordinate errors and disobedience that seemed to allow victory to
elude him; eventually, he introduced the Führungsoffizier (leadership officer), a
sort of Nazi commissar to ensure the ideological loyalty of those subordinates.
Beginning in 1942, by contrast, Stalin came to trust first a small group and
eventually a much larger number of professional officers, giving them the same
confidence and subordinate initiative that had characterized the German officer
corps at its best.51
304 Appendix
As opposed to Losurdo’s praise for Stalin’s military genius, the evidence

leads to a different answer. It can be claimed with justification that the purges
of the Red Army were a self-inflicted wound; the Nazi-Soviet Pact was a
blunder, and intelligence reports about the German military buildup were
willfully ignored by Stalin. The USSR won the war, but this was more due to
the heroism of the Red Army and the superiority of its planned economy than
to Stalin’s leadership.
Khrushchev was not wrong to claim that Stalin’s leadership made victory
over the Third Reich much more difficult:
In the end we survived and were victorious, and we learned from our mistakes
how to command troops properly, and we smashed the enemy. But what did that
cost? If what Stalin did, when he dreamed up all these “enemies of the people”
and destroyed loyal military men—if that had not happened, I am convinced that
our victory would have cost us many fewer lives. Our victory would have been
cheaper, if it is morally permissible to use that word in view of the vast amount
of blood that was shed, the human lives that were lost, the people who were
forced to lay down their lives during the war. Everything would have happened
at much less cost and much more easily for our people.52
G. SOVIET PATRIOTISM
When it comes to Stalin’s embrace of nationalism, Losurdo heartily approves

of it. He thinks that Stalin’s Soviet nationalism was perfectly compatible with
proletarian internationalism. Losurdo quotes approvingly from Comintern
President George Dimitrov: “It is necessary to develop a line of thought that
combines wise nationalism, properly understood, with proletarian interna-
tionalism. Proletarian internationalism should be based on the nationalism
of individual countries . . . between that properly understood nationalism
and proletarian internationalism there can be no contradiction. Nationless
cosmopolitanism, which denies national sentiment and the idea of the nation,
doesn’t have anything in common with proletarian internationalism.”53 Once
again, Losurdo’s embrace of Stalinist “realism” means that he cannot see how
this Thermidorian policy damaged the cause of socialism.
Stalin’s adoption of nationalism and retreat from internationalism began
long before the war. After the upheavals of the Five-Year Plan and agricultural
collectivization, Stalin saw the need for new policies aimed at restoring sta-
bility which included the revival of the traditional family, social hierarchies,
and cultural conservativism. This was something that Losurdo recognized
and praised as a necessary move away from “utopianism.” Among the new
policies was the promotion of Great Russian nationalism. In the USSR, which
was a multinational country that supported the equality of all nationalities, the
elevation of one national group went against its avowed socialist principles.
The Marxist veneer over Russian nationalism grew very thin once the war
began. Stalin proclaimed that the Soviet Union was fighting a “Great Patriotic
War” against the German invader. In the propaganda, there were appeals to the
whole “Soviet people,” but it was the Russians who were viewed as the heart
and soul of the war effort. According to a February 1942 article in Pravda:
“The Great Russian people—elder brother and first among equals in a single
Soviet family—lent tremendous assistance to other peoples. With its help,
formerly oppressed peoples achieved their liberation, [and] economic and
cultural golden age.”54 As part of the war effort, Tsarist heroes and Russian
symbols were revived. Wartime nationalism included the dissolution of the
Comintern in 1943 and the symbolic change of the national anthem from the
Internationale to the overtly nationalist Hymn of the Soviet Union in 1944.
In his novel Life and Fate, the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman clearly
understood that Russian wartime nationalism was the culmination of the
politics of socialism in one country:
This awakening of national consciousness can be related to the tasks facing

the State during the war and the years after the war: the struggle for national
sovereignty and the affirmation of what is truly Russian, truly Soviet, in every
area of life. These tasks, however, were not suddenly imposed on the State; they
appeared when the events in the countryside, the creation of a national heavy
industry and the complete change in the ruling cadres marked the triumph of a
social order defined by Stalin as “Socialism in One Country.”
The birthmarks of Russian social democracy were finally erased. And this pro-
cess finally became manifest at a time when Stalingrad was the only beacon of
freedom in the kingdom of darkness.
A people’s war reached its greatest pathos at the time of the defence of
Stalingrad; the logic of events was such that Stalin chose this moment to pro-
claim openly his ideology of State nationalism.55
In contrast, Losurdo says that this wartime patriotism did not detract from
Stalin’s internationalism. As evidence, he cites the following from Stalin’s
1942 statement about the German people:
Historical experience proves that Hitlers come and go, but the German people,
the German state, remains. The strength of the Red Army resides in the fact
that it doesn’t nurture, nor could it nurture, any hatred toward other people, and
therefore couldn’t even nurture hatred for the German people; it is educated in
306 Appendix
the spirit of the equality of all peoples and all races, in the spirit of respect for
the rights of other peoples.56
Marxists, however, should not judge any phenomenon based on mere surface
rhetoric. In practice, the USSR replaced internationalism with national chau-
vinism. For example, Soviet propaganda described the war not as one between
classes, but between nations. This meant all Germans were now dehumanized
as an enemy nation. Ilya Ehrenburg’s articles in the military journal Red Star
provide a grotesque example of this dehumanizing propaganda:
The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means
to us the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the
quick. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If
you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day. . . . If
you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. . . . Kill
the German—that is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German—that is your
child’s prayer. Kill the German—that is your motherland’s loud request. Do not
miss. Do not let through. Kill.57
No doubt Losurdo would claim that Ehrenburg’s words violated the official
party line, but truth be told, the political education in the Red Army encour-
aged this chauvinistic thinking.
The tragic results of this brutalizing propaganda were on display once the
Red Army entered Germany. Writers like Ehrenburg exhorted soldiers to take
vengeance on the people there: “All the trenches, graves and ravines with the
corpses of the innocents are advancing on Berlin. . . . As we advance through
Pomerania, we have before our eyes the devastated blood-drenched country-
side of Belorussia. . . . Germany, you can whirl round in circles, and howl in
your deathly agony. The hour of revenge has struck!”58 There was not only
widespread looting by the Red Army, but pervasive rape.
When Yugoslav diplomat Milovan Djilas brought reports of this to Stalin’s
attention, the General Secretary appeared unconcerned and even endorsed
this brutalization:
You have, of course, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing
is man’s soul, man’s psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from
Stalingrad to Belgrade—over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated
land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones? How can such a
man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after
such horrors? You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal,
nor can it be . . . The important thing is that it fights Germans.59
In February 1945, the party and army command recognized that its troops
were going too far and worked actively to halt rape and looting. Ehrenburg
himself was criticized for his un-Marxist views in Pravda and Red Star: “‘An
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ is an old saying. But it must not be taken
literally. If the Germans marauded, and publicly raped our women, it does not
mean that we must do the same. This has never been and never shall be. Our
soldiers will not allow anything like that to happen—not because of pity for
the enemy, but out of a sense of their own personal dignity. . . . They under-
stand that every breach of military discipline only weakens the victorious Red
Army. . . . Our revenge is not blind. Our anger is not irrational. In an excess
of blind rage one is apt to destroy a factory in conquered enemy territory—a
factory that would be of value to us. Such an attitude can only play into the
enemy’s hands.”60 However, the damage had already been done by then.
It was not only the Germans who were viewed as an enemy nation, but also
other nationalities inside the Soviet Union. After the war started, Stalin feared
collaboration and as a result, two million members of minority nationali-
ties—Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars, Chechens, and other Transcaucasian
populations—were deported to Siberia. Losurdo acknowledges these depor-
tations, but simply says that other great powers were doing the same thing.
True enough, but he fails to address how Stalinist policies led to the mass
deportations of nationalities.
There was an added side to Soviet nationalism that wanted to present the
war as a singular experience. Soviet propaganda portrayed the war as one of
national survival where all nationalities in the USSR were considered equal
victims of Nazism. This was not the case. For instance, many Ukrainians,
who were bitterly anticommunist, actively collaborated with the Germans.
Moreover, Soviet Jews were singled out for extermination. Articles discuss-
ing the Final Solution, like Vasily Grossman’s “Ukraine Without Jews,”
were not allowed to be published since they challenged this dominant nar-
rative. Following the war, Grossman worked with the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee to collect material about the Holocaust in The Complete Black
Book of Russian Jewry. Soviet authorities found the book unacceptable since
it admitted there were Nazi collaborators to the genocide among Ukrainians
and Lithuanians. In 1947, the Soviet edition of The Complete Black Book of
Russian Jewry was banned, and all copies were destroyed.61
Great Russian nationalism did not abate after the war, but mutated into
a vitriolic xenophobia. The Soviet press championed the Russian people
as the source of all that was good and noble in civilization. This xenopho-
bia had noticeable anti-Semitic undertones, particularly in the campaign
against “rootless cosmopolitans” launched in the late 1940s. Ostensibly, this
campaign was directed against foreign and non-proletarian culture as ideo-
logically subversive, but it proceeded to target many Jewish intellectuals as
308 Appendix
“alien” to Soviet life. In the midst of this campaign, fifteen members of the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested and executed.
The culmination of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign was the so-called
Doctor’s Plot in 1952, when a group of predominantly Jewish doctors were
accused of plotting to assassinate Soviet leaders. In a speech, Stalin linked
the doctors to Jewish nationalists: “Every Jew-Nationalist is an agent of
American intelligence. Jew-Nationalists think that the U.S. (where you can
become rich, bourgeois, and so on) saved their nation. They feel obliged
to the Americans. Among the doctors are many Jew-Nationalists.”62 The
Doctor’s Plot was likely a signal for a new purge that was only stopped by
Stalin’s death.
Losurdo claims that the Doctor’s Plot was not a manifestation of Stalin’s
anti-Semitism. In fact, he believed that Stalin’s purge of “cosmopolitanism”
was needed to remove any trace of abstract universalism in Soviet life:
Cosmopolitanism is an internationalism that leads to national nihilism. We

also saw Stalin, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, stress that, contrary to a
“cosmopolitanism” incapable of assuming its national responsibilities, interna-
tionalism must know how to be combined with patriotism. That means that, far
from being synonymous with antisemitism, the criticism of cosmopolitanism is
an essential element in the struggle against Nazi-fascism (and antisemitism).63
More than the falsification of the historical record, the main problem with
Losurdo’s work on Stalin is the “black legend” he constructs favoring
the General Secretary. He accepts Stalin’s pseudo-Marxist “realism” and
rejection of revolutionary internationalism. He ends up apologizing for its
retreats and crimes as historically necessary to reach socialism. Ultimately,
Losurdo’s whole perspective cannot understand the true nature of the Stalinist
Thermidor.
NOTES
1. For Hegel and the French Revolution, see Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison
Fluss, “Hegel, Enlightenment, and Revolution.” Left Voice, July 26, 2020. https://
www.leftvoice.org/hegel-enlightenment-and-revolution/.
2. Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, trans.
David Ferreira (Morrisville, NC: Lulu, 2020b), 36. This translation of Losurdo is
unofficial and often clunky, but it does convey the basic meaning of the text.
When it comes to the Chinese Revolution, Losurdo views the “romantic” Mao
and “realist” Deng as the counterparts respectively to Trotsky and Stalin. He argued
that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were based on the illusion
that the productive forces would be increased by “relying on mobilisation and mass
enthusiasm.” He says that Mao’s campaigns were a failure that exacerbated inequali-
ties in China. Losurdo praised Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms for rapidly expanding
the productive forces and successfully carrying out a modern NEP in China. He said
Chinese leaders like Deng freed socialism from “its abstract utopian components”
with their “messianic aura” of mass struggle by “normalizing” the market, the rule of
law, and the promotion of material incentives. Losurdo concludes that China shows
the success of socialism as a pragmatic and “realistic” endeavor once it is purged of
revolutionary and utopian fantasies. See Domenico Losurdo, “World War I, the Octo-
ber Revolution and Marxism’s Reception in the West and East,” in Cataclysm 1914:
The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, ed. Alexander Anie-
vas (Boston: Brill, 2015), 275; Losurdo 2003, 55; Losurdo 2016a, 193–96; Domenico
Losurdo, “Flight from History? The Communist Movement between Self-Criticism
and Self-Contempt,” Nature, Society and Thought 13, no. 3 (October 2000b):
494–97. For a discussion on Losurdo’s views about Mao and Deng in comparison to
Alain Badiou, see Doug Enaa Greene, “A Unity of Opposites: The Dengist and the
Red Guard,” Monthly Review Online, August 19, 2022. https://mronline.org/2022/08
/19/a-unity-of-opposites-the-dengist-and-the-red-guard/.
3. Jean-Jacques Marie and Domenico Losurdo, “Losurdo’s ‘Stalin’: the debate
between Jean-Jacques Marie and Domenico Losurdo,” Historical Materialism. https:
//www historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/losurdos-stalin-debate-between-jean
-jacques-marie-and-domenico-losurdo.
4. Grover Furr, The Murder of Sergei Kirov (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press and
Media, LLC, 2013), back cover.
5. Domenico Losurdo, “Preface,” Associazione Stalin. https://www
.associazionestalin .it
/losurdo _preffurrhtml; In return, Furr has praised Losurdo’s
Stalin: “I found Losurdo’s firm defense of Stalin, particularly on the basis of the
Soviet Union’s and the Comintern’s fight against imperialism, to be a breath of fresh
air, a sign that there were others who questioned the demonization of Stalin and the
consequent rejection of the communist movement of the 20th century.” Grover Furr,
“In Memoriam Domenico Losurdo,” Grover Furr, July 1, 2018. https://msuweb
.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/losurdo_furr070118 html; See also the friendly
exchange between Furr and Losurdo on Nicholas Werth, see Domenico Losurdo and
Grover Furr, “Lo storico statunitense Grover Furr a proposito del dibattito su Stalin
tra Domenico Losurdo e Nicolas Werth,” Domenico Losurdo. http://domenicolosurdo
.blogspot.com/2013/01/lo-storico-statunitense-grover-furr html. For a refutation of
Furr’s methodology, see Doug Enaa Greene, “Grover Furr and the Moscow Trials,”
The Blanquist, May 3, 2017. http://blanquist.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-grover-furr
-and-moscow-trials.html.
6. Marie and Losurdo, “Losurdo’s Stalin.”
7. Losurdo 2020b, 67.
8. Ibid., 74.
9. Ibid., 58 and 61.
10. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of the Dictator (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2015), 133–34. See also Getty and Naumov 1999, 141–47.
310 Appendix
11. See J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (New York: Verso, 2019), 747, and Edward
Hallett Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Interregnum 1923–1924 (Harmond-
sworth, Middlesex: Penguin: 1969), 164.
12. Losurdo 2020b, 66–67.
13. Ibid., 63 and 74–75.
14. Cohen 1980, 375–76. For more on the soviet practice of torture and forced
confessions, see Getty and Naumov 1999, 3, 477, and 489.
15. Vadim Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror (Oak Park: Mehring Books,
1998), 66. Quoted in Losurdo 2020b, 70. On Trotsky’s characterization of the purges
as a one-sided civil war, see “Once Again: The USSR and Its Defense,” in Trotsky
1976, 38.
16. On the concept of Thermidorian amalgams, see Leon Trotsky, “The Comintern
and the GPU,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1939–1940] (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1973e), 349. See also Deutscher on the amalgam in the USSR in Isaac Deutscher, The
Great Purges (New York: Basil Blackwater Publisher, 1984a), 69. Ironically, Grover
Furr accuses Trotsky of resorting to amalgams to hide his conspiracies. See Grover
Furr, Trotsky’s Amalgams: Trotsky’s Lies, the Moscow Trials as Evidence, the Dewey
Commission. Trotsky’s Conspiracies of the 1930s, Volume One (Kettering, OH: Eryth-
ros Press and Media, 2015).
17. Rogovin 1998, 6.
18. Quoted in Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin (New York: Pioneer Publishers,
1937), 116.
19. Benito Mussolini, “5 Marzo 1938,” in Opera Omnia Benito Mussolini XXIX
(Firenze: La Fenice, 1959), 64. [my translation]
20. Leon Trotsky, “Thermidor and Anti-Semitism,” in On the Jewish Question
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 2009), 36.
21. Vadim Rogovin, Stalin’s Terror of 1937–1938: Political Genocide in the USSR
(Oak Park, IL: Mehring Books, 2009), 316. See also Tucker 1990, 507; Ivo Banac,
With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1988), 67. See also Chase 2001. The purges also extended into
Spain. See Rogovin 1998, 335–38, 341–44, 346–53, 369–72.
22. Losurdo 2020b, 76. Grover Furr also believes that Tukhachevsky was involved
in a military plot. See Grover Furr and the Spartacist League, “In Defense of Marshal
Tukhachevsky,” Workers Vanguard 41–42 (Winter 1987–88): 45–48. https://www
.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/spartacist-us/1988–1993/0041–0042_Winter
_1989–88.pdf.
23. Losurdo 2020b, 112. See also Kotkin 2018, 52.
24. Losurdo 2020b, 76. Molotov claimed years later that it was necessary to remove
any potential fifth columnists in case of war. See V. M. Molotov and Feliz Chuev,
Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics (Chicago: Ivan D. Ree, 1993), 254.
25. Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1985), 259.
26. Deutscher 2003c, 314. Losurdo 2020b, 77–78.
27. Quoted in V. K. Triandafillov, The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies
(Newbury Park: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1994), xxx. Soviet strategist Alexander
Svechin defined operational art as follows: “Battle is the means of operation. Tactics
are the material of operational art. The operation is the means of strategy, and opera-
tional art is the material of strategy.” See Aleksandr A. Svechin, Strategy (Minneapo-
lis: East View Publications, 1992), 38.
28. Quoted in Rogovin 1998, 403. See also Kotkin 2018, 245 and Tucker 1990, 233.
29. Quoted in Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love,
Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017), 236.
30. Kotkin 2018, 414. Grover Furr goes so far as to wonder if the bloodstains on
Tukhachevsky’s confession came from a nosebleed and not a beating: “Let’s assume
these are bloodstains. What might have caused them? A nosebleed. A paper cut.
Whose blood? It could be anybody’s: the interrogator’s; the secretary-typist’s; from
one of the archivists handling the document. Or, it could be Tukhachevsky’s.” See
Grover Furr, Vladimir L. Bobrov, and Sven-Eric Holmström, Trotsky and the Military
Conspiracy Soviet and Non-Soviet Evidence; with the Complete Transcript of the
“Tukhachevsky Affair” Trial (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press and Media, LLC), 100.
31. Rogovin 1998, 416–25; Kotkin doubts that the manufactured plot mattered
much in Tukhachevsky’s death, see Kotkin 2018, 377–78. For background on the
frame-up orchestrated by Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich and a White émigré named
General N. Skoblin, see Paul W. Blackstock, “The Tukhachevsky Affair,” Russian
Review 28, no. 2 (April 1969): 171–90; Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs
of the Spy Hitler Couldn’t Silence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 67; Tucker 1990,
381–83.
32. “Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Commit-
tee of the C.P.S.U.(B.)—January 26, 1934,” SCW, vol. 13, 308–9.
33. Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 59–60. See also Cohen 1980, 356–57 and 360–62.
34. Kotkin 2018, 387.
35. Lewin 2005b, 110.
36. Rogovin 2009, 202. For Goebbels on the military purges, see Kotkin 2018, 432.
37. Losurdo 2020b, 70.
38. “Resolution of the ECCI Presidium on the Situation in Germany—1 April
1933,” in The Communist International 1919–1943—Volume III: 1929–1943, ed. Jane
Degras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 257.
39. Losurdo 2020b, 162.
40. Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in
Europe 1933–39 (London: Palgrave, 1984), 116.
41. Losurdo 2020b, 162. See also Domenico Losurdo, “Stalin and Hitler: Twin
Brothers or Mortal Enemies?” Crisis and Critique 3, no. 1 (2016b): 34.
42. Quoted in Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time: The
Hitler-Chamberlain Collusion (London: Merlin Books, 1997), 151.
43. Losurdo 2020b, 162. For background on the failed alliance between the West
and the USSR, see Michael Jabara Carley, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and
the Coming of World War II (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999).
44. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 19. See also Kotkin 2018, 770–73. To his
312 Appendix
credit, Losurdo does acknowledge that the Katyn Massacre was a crime. See Losurdo
2020b, 236. Another difference between Furr and Losurdo is that the former denies
that the USSR committed the Katyn Massacre. See Grover Furr, The Mystery of the
Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, The Solution (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press and
Media, LLC, 2018).
45. Jürgen Forster and Evan Μawdsley, “Hitler and Stalin in Perspective: Secret
Speeches on the Eve of Barbarossa,” War in History 11, no. 1 (January 2004): 73.
46. Bini Adamczak, Yesterday’s Tomorrow: On the Loneliness of Communist Spec-
ters and the Reconstruction of the Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021), 8. See also
Alex de Jong, “Stalin Handed Hundreds of Communists Over to Hitler,” Jacobin
Magazine, August 21, 2021. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/08/hitler-stalin-pact
-nazis-communist-deportation-soviet.
47. Edward E. Ericson III, Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to
Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (Westport: Praeger, 1990), 182.
48. David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red
Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 45 and 56.
49. Stalin quoted in Khlevniuk 2015, 199. On Soviet intelligence failures, see:
Kotkin 869, 927–29; Roberts 2006, 66–67; Glantz and House 2015, 67.
50. Marie and Losurdo, “Losurdo’s Stalin”; See also Losurdo 2020b, 13 and 251.
51. Glantz and House 2015, 52. For differing assessments of Stalin’s wartime lead-
ership, see Deutscher 1966, 461–97; Kevin McDermott, Stalin (New York: Palgrave,
2006), 124; Roberts 2006, 367; Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy
(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 474; and Moshe Lewin, “Stalin in the Mirror
of the Other,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Ker-
shaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 127.
52. Nikita Khrushchev, The Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev Volume I: Commissar
[1918–1945] (Providence: Brown University Press, 2004), 663.
53. Losurdo 2020b, 97.
54. Jonathan Brunstedt, The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the
Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 24.
55. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (New York: New York Review Books,
2006), 665.
56. Losurdo 2020b, 30.
57. Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expul-
sion of the Germans (New York: Routledge, 1977), 65–66.
58. Quoted in Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army,
1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 302.
59. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Penguin Books, 1967),
87. See Roberts 2006 263–65 for figures on rape.
60. Quoted in Alexander Werth, Russia at War 1941–1945 (New York: Carroll &
Graf, 1984), 966.
61. Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2019), 3, 159–64 and 189–91.
62. Quoted in Roberts 2006, 341.
63. Losurdo 2020b, 207.
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Index
abstract utopianism, 144 Anderson, Perry, 58, 158,

Action Française, 61 272–73, 280n79
Aczél, György, 149 Andropov, Yuri, 47
Adamczak, Bini, 300 Angelus Novus (Klee), xiv
Aden, Arabie (Nizan), 173–74 Animal Farm (Orwell), 16–18
Adorno, Theodor, xxiii, 117–20, 188n8, anti-communism: Bolshevism as
188n11; Benjamin and, 126; The satanic, xii; Hitler and, 65; Stalinism
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120, as satanic, xii
189n16; on fascism, 120; on Moscow anti-fascist movements: Benjamin and,
Trials, 119 125–26; Brecht in, 130–31
Adventures of the Dialectic (Merleau- anti-humanism, 166–67, 198n193
Ponty), 110–11, 180 anti-Jacobinism: Arendt on, 40–41;
Agulhon, Maurice, 55 Counter-Enlightenment Project and,
Algerian War, 169, 183, 186 39–43; totalitarianism and, 39–43
Ali, Tariq, 272–73, 280n80 anti-Semitism, 309–10; Dreyfus Affair,
Althusser, Louis, xxiii, 117; anti- 40; far-right, 8; Horkheimer on,
humanism of, 166–67, 198n193; on 189n13; racial, 8; of Solzhenitsyn,
Chinese Revolution, 167–68; Essays 6–8; in Soviet Union, 189n13;
on Self-Criticism, 168; For Marx, spiritual, 8; Thermidor concept and,
164–65, 198n190; Frankfurt School 226; totalitarianism and, 30
and, 164–71; French Communist anti-Stalinist movements: Trotsky and,
Party and, 164–71; Maoism and, 122; Ukrainian Resurgent Army,
169, 171, 199n199; on Secret 9n18; Vlassov movement, 9n18
Speech, 165–66, 286; as Western anti-totalitarian movements, 58
Marxist, 164–71 Aragon, Louis, 173, 251–52
Amendola, Giovanni, 27 Arendt, Hannah, 242n45; on anti-
Amis, Martin, 89n133 Jacobinism, 40–41; on Nazism, 31;
Andersen, Martin, 131 Origins of Totalitarianism, 30–32,
Anderson, Barbara, 70
339
340 Index
40; On Revolution, 40; on Stalinism, Birchall, Ian, 245n75

31; on totalitarianism, 30–32, 86n101 Birth of Our Power (Serge), 251
Aristotle, 32 The Black Book of Communism,
Aron, Raymond, 105, 174 75–79; Counter-Enlightenment
Arrival and Departure (Koestler), 101 Project and, xxiii, 44, 60, 76–79;
Audry, Colette, 172–73 critiques of, 77–78
Aulard, François Victor Alphonse, 228 Black Hundreds, in Russia, 2, 8
“The Author as Producer” black parliamentarism, 156, 197n156
(Benjamin), 125 Blair, Tony, 163
Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, 43
Babel, Isaac, 252 Bloch, Ernst, xxiii; Benjamin and, 124;
Babeuf, Gracchus, 42, 215, 226 on Bolshevik Revolution, 123; in
Bakunin, Mikhail, xiii German Academy of Sciences, 122;
Barbusse, Henri, 252 on Moscow Trials, 121; as political
Bartov, Omer, 67 exile, 121; return to Germany,
Beauvoir, Simone de, 187; Koestler and, 122; on Trotsky, 122; as Western
102–3; on Moscow Trials, 172–73; Marxist, 121–23
Sartre and, 172–78, 181 Blum Theses (Lukács), 145
Before Stalinism (Farber), 276n26 Blyukher, Vasily, 296
Behemoth (Neumann), 29 Bolshevik Party: power struggles
Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 181 within, 33–34; Thermidor concept
Bell, Daniel, 277n38 and, 217. See also Bukharin, Nikolai;
Benjamin, Walter, xxiii, 100, 119, Stalin, Josef; Trotsky, Leon
274n6; Adorno and, 126; anti-fascist Bolshevik Revolution, 37, 185; Bloch
movements and, 125–26; “The on, 123; as civil war, 63–64; French
Author as Producer,” 125; Bloch Revolution as influence on, 63–64;
and, 124; Communist Party of totalitarianism as result of, 53–54.
Germany and, 124; critique of the See also Russian Revolution
Enlightenment, 127–28; Critique of Bolsheviks: class genocide by, 73; in
Violence, 123–24; disillusion with Darkness at Noon, 100; Kronstadt
Soviet Union, 124–27; Horkheimer Mutiny/Uprising and, 216, 253–54;
and, 126–27; on Moscow Show Luxemburg on, 213; New Economic
Trials, xii; on mystical fatalism, Policy and, 33–34; Oppositional
xiv; One-Way Street, xi; The Origin Bolsheviks, 70, 224; role in Russian
of German Tragic Drama, xi–xii; Revolution, 33
Theses on the Philosophy of History, The Bolsheviks (Ulam), 40
127; Trotsky and, 124–26; on Bolshevism: anti-communist
voluntarism, xiv; as Western Marxist, responses to, xii; evil foundations
123–28; “The Work of Art in the Age of, xiii; hegemonic theory of,
of Mechanical Reproduction,” 125 157; Jacobinism and, 40, 214–15;
Berlin Uprising, 269 Judeo-Bolshevism, 2; proletarian
Berman, Matvei, 6 Jacobinism and, 207–8; purges as
Bettelheim, Charles, 199n199 feature of, 15; in Russia, xxi; as
Big Brother concept, Stalinism and, satanic, xii; Stalinism as evolution
11–22; totalitarianism and, 16–22
Index 341
of, 35, 205; theory of elites and, 28; Bruckner, Pascal, 58

universalist, 4 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 31–32, 39
“bolt from the blue” approach, to Buber-Neumann, Margarete, 48
Stalinism: Big Brother concept, Büchner, Georg, xiv, xxi
11–22; Jews as “virus” in, 1–8; Bukharin, Nikolai, 33, 36–37, 108,
methodological approach to, xxiii– 246n108, 288–89; arrest of, 295;
xxiv; totalitarianism and, 27–34 Stalin and, 95, 221; trial of, 134. See
Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon also Moscow Show Trials
III), xxii. See also The Eighteenth Bulletin of the Opposition
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; (Trotsky), 263, 292
Napoleon III Buonarroti, Philippe, 42–43
Bonaparte, Napoleon, Second Empire bureaucratic collectivism, 24n42
under, xii Burke, Edmund, 43
Bonapartism, xxi, 197n166; Thermidor Burnham, James, 18–20, 24n42, 105,
concept and, 231–32. See also 182, 249–50, 259–60, 276n31
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bush, George W., 69
Louis Bonaparte
Borchardt, Hermann, 191n58 Cachin, Marcel, 214
Bordiga, Amadeo, 150–52. See also Callinicos, Alexander, 266
Italian Communist Party Camus, Albert, 113n13; Koestler and,
Borkenau, Franz, 16, 28, 105 102–4; The Rebel, 104, 114n31
bourgeois revolution, in Russia, 208–9 The Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn), 46
Brandler, Henirich, 269 Cannon, James P., 272
Brecht, Bertolt, xxiii, 117–18, 124, Capital (Marx), 94, 128
191n58, 254; in anti-fascist capitalism, 1; communism and, 111
movements, 130–31; on Chinese Carmichael, Stokely, 187
Revolution, 137–38; critique of Carr, Edward Hallett, 34–35
Nazi-Soviet Pact, 135–36; “The The Case of Comrade Tulayev (Serge),
farmer’s address to his ox,” 135; 258–59, 288
in German Democratic Republic, Castro, Fidel, 78, 187
136; Great Terror and, 131; House Caute, David, 169
Un-American Activities Commission CCF. See Congress for
and, 136; Korsch and, 128–29, Cultural Freedom
133–34; Life of Galileo, 133–34; Me- Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 78
Ti, 129; on Moscow Trials, 131–33; Central Intelligence Agency
“The Solution,” 137; on Stalin, 130; (CIA), 30, 104–5
Stalinism and, 137–38; theater career Chamberlain, Neville, 299
of, 128–29; Threepenny Opera, 128; Chamberlin, William, 214
“To those born after,” 132–33; on Chambers, Whitaker, 73–74
Trotsky, 130, 134–35; as Western Chinese Revolution, 137–38; Althusser
Marxist, 124, 128–38 on, 167–68; Losurdo on, 308n2
Bredel, Willi, 131 Churchill, Winston, xxiii, 80n18,
Brentano, Bernard von, 135 286; on Moscow Show Trials, 4;
Brezhnev, Leonid, 46, 193n94 Mussolini and, 4; on Nazi Germany,
Broué, Pierre, 240n1 28–29; on Russian Civil War, 2–3;
342 Index
on subversive Jews, 2–5, 8n4; on purges from, 227–28, 245n82; Third

totalitarianism, 28–29 Period, 232, 262; Trotsky expulsion
CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency from, 227; Twenty-Second Congress,
Ciliga, Ante, 48 46; Zinoviev expulsion from, 227.
Clemenceau, Georges, 225 See also Communist International;
Cliff, Tony, 9n18 specific communist parties
Cobban, Alfred, 55–56 The Communists and the Peace
Cochin, Augustin, 58 (Sartre), 178–80
Cohen, Stephen, 29–30, 34, 36–37, 289 The Complete Black Book of Russian
Cold War: The Black Book of Jewry, 307
Communism, xxiii; Counter- The Condition of the Working Class in
Enlightenment Project, England (Engels), 11
xxiii, 249, 268 Congress for Cultural Freedom
collectivism: bureaucratic, 24n42; Stalin (CCF), 105
campaigns, 70; Trotsky on, 221–22 Conquered City (Serge), 251
Collinet, Michel, 172 Conquest, Robert, xxiii, 7, 287; The
colonialism, 78, 183 Great Terror, 69; Harvest of Sorrow,
COMINTERN. See Communist 68–70; historical legacy of, 71–72;
International Orwell and, 69
communism: The Black Book of Conrad, Joseph, 264
Communism, xxiii, 44, 60, 75–79; Conspiracy of Equals, 42, 226
capitalism and, 111; emancipatory Cornford, John, 160
potential of, xxi; fascism and, Corrigan, Philip, 200n201
88n117; Marx on, 49; Orwell’s cosmopolitanism, 308
critique of, 13, 22; Solzhenitsyn as Counter-Enlightenment Project: anti-
critic of, 48–49; totalitarianism and, Jacobinism and, 39–43; The Black
32–33; U.S. Central Intelligence Book of Communism and, xxiii, 44,
Agency fight against, 30. See also 60, 76–79; Cold War and, xxiii, 249,
specific countries 268; Solzhenitsyn and, 52; Soviet
Communist Age of Reason, 210 Union as “Evil Empire” and, 68;
Communist International totalitarianism and, 27–34
(COMINTERN): founding of, 215; Courtois, Stéphane, 76–77
Italian Communist Party and, 150; CPGB. See Communist Party of
Koestler and, 97; Losurdo and, Great Britain
297–298; Lukács denounced by, CPSU. See Communist Party of the
143; promotion of revolutions, 222; Soviet Union
Serge and, 250 Critique of Dialectical Reason
Communist Party of Germany (KPD), (Sartre), 172, 184
95, 124, 159 Critique of Violence (Benjamin), 123–24
Communist Party of Great Britain Cuban Revolution, 187
(CPGB), 159, 163 Cultural Revolution, in Soviet
Communist Party of Poland Union, 37–38
(KPP), 262, 291
Communist Party of the Soviet Union The Daily Worker, 161–62
(CPSU): Gramsci and, 152–53; Daniel, Yuli, 48
Index 343
Danton, Georges, 206, 209 283–84; totalitarianism and, 41, 43;

Danton’s Death (Büchner), xiv, xxi value judgments on, 273
Darkness at Noon (Koestler), xxiii, Dialogue with Death (Koestler), 102
97, 100–104, 107, 112; Bolshevik dictatorships, 31
references in, 100 Dimitrov, George, 304
Davidson, Neil, 266 Dirty Hands (Sartre), 181–82
Davies, Joseph, 292 Djilas, Milovan, 306–7
Davies, R. W., 70–71 Doctor’s Plot, 308
Davis, Mike, 78 Dommanget, Maurice, 55
Day, Richard, 243n61 Donovan, Bill, 104
Deng Xiaoping, 308n2 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 73–74
Les Derniers temps (Malraux), 261 Dreyfus, Alfred, 253
Desanti, Dominique, 174 Dreyfus Affair, 40
Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 174 Dubček, Alexander, 149
despotism, xxi Duclos, Jacques, 178
de-Stalinization campaigns: Duke, David, 8
under Khrushchev, 268–71; Durtain, Luc, 251
Marcuse on, 140 Dzerzhinsky, Feliks, 210
Destiny of a Revolution (Serge), 253
The Destruction of Reason (Lukács), Eastman, Max, 257
146, 189n16 Economic and Philosophical
Deutscher, Isaac, xxiv, 34, 105, 140, Manuscripts (Marx), 138, 143
145, 187, 279n74; in Communist Ehrenburg, Ilya, 252, 306
Party of Poland, 262; defense of Eichmann, Adolf, 66
Stalinism, 265; Gomułka and, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
269–70; Hobsbawm and, 162; as Bonaparte (Marx), xii–xiii, xxii
journalist, 264; on Maoism, 270–71; Eisler, Hanns, 119, 130
as Marxist historian, 262–73; The electoralism, 112
Moscow Trial, 263; The Prophet elites, theory of, Bolshevism and, 28
Armed, 267; The Prophet Outcast, Engels, Friedrich, xiii; The Condition of
267; The Prophet Unarmed, 267; on the Working Class in England, 11; on
Secret Speech, 284; Stalin, 264–65; French Revolution, 205–6
on Stalin as military leader, 303; England, Independent Labour Party, 12
on Tukhachevsky Affair, 292; The the Enlightenment: Benjamin as critic
Unfinished Revolution, 271 of, 127–28; philosophes, 43, 58;
Dewey, John, 105, 257 rationalism during, xxiii, 67–68. See
Dialectical and Historical Materialism also Counter-Enlightenment Project
(Stalin), 160 Enragés group, 228
The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno Ericson, Edward, 301
and Horkheimer), 120, 189n16 Essays on Self-Criticism
Dialectic of Saturn: as concept, xi–xii, (Althusser), 168
xv, 281–82; Greene on, xv; historical Everyday Stalinism (Fitzpatrick), 38
necessity approach and, 101, 112; existentialism, Sartre and, 174–75, 186
Losurdo and, 283–84; scope of, Existentialism versus Marxism
(Novack), 95
344 Index
Experiments in Economic Planning in 117–20; Institute for Social Research

the Soviet Union (Pollock), 118 and, 118; Lukács and, 142–50;
Marcuse and, 138–42; Western
Fainsod, Merle, 34, 80n22 Marxism and, 117
famines: death tolls from, 78; in French Communist Party (PCF), 55;
Ukraine, 70–71, 78 Althusser and, 164–71; founding
Fanon, Frantz, 186–87 of, 214; Losurdo on, 298; Merleau-
Farber, Samuel, 276n26 Ponty and, 106; during Paris protests
“The farmer’s address to his ox” in 1968, 57; Sartre and, 172, 175–76,
(Brecht), 135 178–79; student wing of, 167
Farrell, James, 257 French Revolution: Bolshevik
far-right anti-Semitism, 8 Revolution influenced by, 63–64; as
fascism: Adorno on, 120; communism bourgeois revolution, 57; despotism
and, 88n117. See also anti- at end of, xxi; Engels on, 205–6;
fascist movements Furet on, 55–57; historical legacy
Fast, Howard, 113n18 of, 1; Hobsbawm on, 1; Machiavelli
Fastenko, Anatoly Ilyich, 45 and, 242n45; mobilization of
fatalism, Benjamin on, xiv oppressed during, 1; nouveaux
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 131–32 philosophes, 57–59; Robespierre and,
Finkelraut, Alain, 58 xiii; Russian Revolution modeled on,
The First Circle (Solzhenitsyn), 47 215–16, 231
First Congress of Soviets, 209 Frenkel, Naftaly, 6
Fischer, Ernst, 281 Friedländer, Saul, 67
Fischer, Louis, 104 Friedrich, Carl, 31–32, 39
Fischer, Ruth, 288 From Lenin to Stalin (Serge), 252
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 34, 37–38 Furet, François, 85n89; in anti-
Five-Year Plans, 168, 229–30, 235; after totalitarian movement, 58; The Black
Russian Revolution, 37 Book of Communism, 60; French
Fluss, Harrison, 194n107 Communist Party, 55; on French
For Marx (Althusser), 164–65, 198n190 Revolution, 55–57; The Passing of
Foundations of Leninism an Illusion, 59
(Stalin), 246n108 Furr, Grover, 285–86, 309n5, 311n30
France: Action Française, 61–62;
Bonapartism in, xxi; Jacobinism Gagarin, Yuri, 61–62
in, xxi; Paris Commune of 1871, Garaudy, Roger, 106, 169; on historical
1; Second Empire, xii; social necessity approach to Stalinism,
revolutions in, 1, 187. See also 93–95; on Marxism, 93–95
French Communist Party; French Gaullism, 261
Revolution; specific emperors; GDR. See German Democratic Republic
specific kings genocide: by Bolsheviks, 73; Hitler and,
Franco, Francisco, 51 66; in Nazi Germany, 64
Frankfurt School, 29, 52, 65; Adorno Gentile, Giovanni, 27–28
and, 117–20; Althusser and, 164–71; George V (King), 294
Gramsci and, 150–59; Hobsbawm George VI (King), 294
and, 159–64; Horkheimer and, Gerassi, Fernando, 173, 176
Index 345
German Democratic Republic Greene, Doug, xii, xv

(GDR), 136 Grigor, Ronald, 39
German Marxism & Russian Grossman, Henryk, 118, 189n23
Communism (Plamenatz), 40 Grossman, Vasily, 305, 307
German October, 219 Guerin, Daniel, 115n58
Germany: Communist Party Guevara, Che, 187
of Germany, 95, 124, 159; The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn),
de-Nazification process in, 139; 6, 44, 47, 50–51, 57–58, 83n74
National Socialist Party, 5, 61–68;
Non-Aggression Pact, 296; Social Habermas, Jürgen, 65
Democratic Party in, 138. See also Halliday, Fred, 272–73, 280n79
German Democratic Republic; Hardy, Daphne, 100
Nazi Germany Harvest of Sorrow (Conquest), 68–70
Getty, J. Arch, 34, 38–39, 47 Hayek, Friedrich, 32–33, 80nn17–18
The Ghost of Stalin (Sartre), 182–83 HCP. See Hungarian Communist Party
Gide, André, 104, 252 Hébertistes group, 228
Ginzburg, Evgenia, 48 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xi, 95;
The Gladiators (Koestler), The Phenomenology of Spirit, xv;
97–100, 113n13 Thermidor realism of, 143–44
Glantz, David, 303–4 Heidegger, Martin, 60–61, 140
Glucksmann, Andrè, 58 Herzen, Alexander, 205
The God that Failed, 104–5 Hess, Rudolf, 23n20
Goebbels, Joseph, 288, 296 Heydrich, Reinhard, 136
Gold, Mike, 252 Hilferding, Rudolf, 28
Goldman, Wendy, 39 Hilgruber, Andreas, 65, 67
Gollan, John, 161 Hill, Christopher, 161
Gollancz, Victor, 11, 20 Hiss, Alger, 74
Gomułka, Władysław, 52, 123, 269–70 historical materialism: Marxism and, 94;
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 37, 163 methodological approach to, xxiii–
Gorky, Maxim, 252 xxiv; Trotsky and, xv
Gramsci, Antonio, xxiii, 117, 163; on historical necessity approach, to
Bolshevization of communism, 151; Stalinism, xxiii–xxiv, 267–68;
CPSU and, 152–53; Frankfurt School conceptual development of, 93–95;
and, 150–59; Italian Communist Dialectic of Saturn and, 101, 112;
Party and, 150–54; permanent Garaudy and, 93–95; Koestler
revolution theory, 158; The Prison and, 101, 112; Lukács on, 146–47;
Notebooks, 150, 155, 157–59, Merleau-Ponty on, 111; Sartre
215; Serge and, 250; Togliatti and, and, 93–95
151–55; on totalitarianism and, historical realism, Marx on, xiv
155; Trotsky and, 150–53, 159; as historicism, German, critiques of, xiv
Western Marxist, 150–59 History and Class Consciousness
Great Depression, 125 (Lukács), 124, 143
Great Purge, 291–97 A History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for
Great Terror, 131, 286–91 Equality (Buonarroti), 42–43
The Great Terror (Conquest), 69 History of Soviet Russia (Carr), 35
346 Index
History of the Russian Revolution Humbert-Droz, Jules, 154, 288

(Trotsky), 126 Hundred Flowers campaign, 271
Hitler, Adolf, xxiii; as anticommunist, Hungarian Communist Party (HCP),
65; genocide under, 66; on Jews 142, 145, 291
as moral threat, 62; on Jews as Hungary, 195n122, 291; communist
supporters of communism, 5; revolution in, 148–49, 182; Lukács
on Judeo-Bolshevism, 5, 68; on in, 146–47; withdrawal from Warsaw
Marxism, 5; Mein Kampf, 295; Pact, 123, 148
National Socialists and, 5; Nolte on, Huxley, Aldous, 252
62, 65; Operation Barbarossa, 5, 68, Hyppolite, Jean, 192n87
136, 301–2; Tukhachevsky Affair
and, 292. See also National Socialist I Choose Freedom
Party; Nazi Germany (Kravchenko), 48, 176
Hobsbawm, Eric, xxiii, 117, Ignatieff, Michael, 163–64
197n171; academic career, 161; Illuminati, 3
in Communist Party of Germany, Ilyich, Vladimir, 196n136
159; in Communist Party of Great imperialism, totalitarianism and, 30
Britain, 159, 163; Deutscher and, “The Impotence of the German Working
162; Frankfurt School and, 159–64; Class” (Horkheimer), 118
on French Revolution, 1; Italian Independent Labour Party (England), 12
Communist Party and, 162–63; on Industrial Revolution, 1
verdicts of Moscow Trials, 160; as Inside the Whale (Orwell), 23n22
Western Marxist, 159–64 Institute for Social Research, 118
Ho Chi Minh, 78, 260–61 International Congress of Writers for the
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 144 Defense, 252
“Hölderlin’s Hyperion” (Lukács), 144 internationalism, 306
Holy Alliance of Metternich, 1 International Relief and Rescue
Homage to Catalonia (Orwell), 14 Committee (IRRC), 19–20
Hook, Sidney, 105, 132, 259 Irving, David, 65
Horkheimer, Max, xxiii, 117–20; on Italian Communist Party (PCI), 150–54;
anti-Semitism in Soviet Union, Bolshevization of, 151; Communist
189n13; Benjamin and, 126–27; International and, 150; Hobsbawm
The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and, 162–63
120, 189n16; Marcuse and, 138–39, Italy, fascism in, 61
141–42; on Stalinism, 119
Horowitz, David, 48, 82n52, 84n76, 273 Jackson, Henry “Scoop,” 72
House Un-American Activities Jacobinism, xxi; Bolshevism and, 40,
Commission, in U.S., 136 214–15; German Social-Democracy
How Russia is Ruled and, 240n12; Jacobin Constitution
(Fainsod), 34, 80n22 of 1793, 40; proletarian, 205–16;
Hoxha, Enver, 78 Rousseau and, 41–42; Russian
Hugo, Victor, xii–xiii; on Revolution and, 55. See also
Napoleon III, xxii anti-Jacobinism
Humanism and Terror (Merleau-Ponty), Jambet, Christian, 58
106–7, 109, 112 James, C. L. R., 183
Index 347
Jánossy, Ferene, 145 113n13; Hess and, 23n20; historical

Jaspers, Karl, 105 necessity approach and, 101, 112;
Jay, Martin, 120 imprisonment of, 96; International
Jewish people: Churchill on, 2–5, 8n4; Relief and Rescue Committee and,
Hitler on, 5; Judeo-Bolshevism, 2; as 19–20; Orwell and, 17, 19–20,
moral threat, 62; “non-subversive,” 100; rejection of Stalinism, 105;
3; Protocols of the Elders of Zion, resignation from Communist Party
2; racial genocide of, 64; role in of Germany, 97; in Soviet Union, 96;
Russian Revolution, 5; “subversive,” The Spanish Testament, 97, 102; The
2–5, 8n4; Trotsky on, 3–4; in Tsarist Yogi and the Commissar, 101–2
Russia, 2; as “virus,” 1–8. See also Kogan, Lazar, 6
anti-Semitism Kołakowski, Leszek, 52–55, 84n81;
“The Jews and Europe” Main Currents of Marxism, 52, 54,
(Horkheimer), 119 84n76; on Marx, 52–53
Joffe, Adolf, 227 Koltsov, Mikhail, 252
Journey in the Whirlwind Korean War, 110
(Ginzburg), 48 Kornfeld, Boris Nikolayevich, 45
Jubilee for Renegades (Bloch), 121–22 Kornilov, Lavr, 210
Judeo-Bolshevism, 2; Hitler and, 5, 68 Korsch, Karl, 128–29, 133–34, 143
Kostrzewa, Wera, 263
Kamenev, Lev, 290 Kotkin, Stephen, 71, 75–76
Kanapa, Jean, 174 Kouchner, Bernard, 58
Karl Marx (Carr), 34–35 KPD. See Communist Party of Germany
Kautsky, Karl, 211, 213 KPP. See Communist Party of Poland
Kerensky, Alexander, 210 Kravchenko, Victor, 48, 176
Kerenskyism, 210 el-Krim, Abd, 172
Kershaw, Ian, 65–66, 86n105 Kronstadt Mutiny/Uprising, 216, 253–
Khlevniuk, Oleg, 287–88 54, 275n15
Khrushchev, Nikita, 193n94; Kubrick, Stanley, 113n18
de-Stalinization campaign under, Kun, Béla, 145, 291
268–71; Secret Speech, 122–23, 137,
148, 165, 247n118 Lācis, Asja, 131
Khrushchev Lied (Furr), 285 Lang, Fritz, 136
Kiernan, Victor, 161 Larina, Anna, 295
Kinnock, Neil, 163 Late Victorian Holocausts (Davis), 78
Kirov, Sergei, 287–88 Lazare, Daniel, 91n166
Klee, Paul, xiv Lecourt, Dominique, 167, 169
Koestler, Arthur, 95–106; Arrival and Lefebvre, Henri, 173–75
Departure, 101; Beauvoir and, Lefort, Claude, 174
102–3; Camus and, 102–4; CIA and, Left Book Club, 14
104–5; Communist International and, leftist concepts, in Nineteen Eighty-
97; in Communist Party of Germany, Four, 24n49
95, 97; Darkness at Noon, xxiii, 97, Left Opposition, 224, 268; Enragés,
100–104, 107, 112; Dialogue with 228; Hébertistes, 228; Maoism and,
Death, 102; The Gladiators, 97–100, 271; Stalinism and, xv
348 Index
Leiris, Michel, 174 Lovestone, Jay, xxi

Lenin, Vladimir, 78; on Bolshevism, Lukács, Georg, xxiii, 117; Blum Theses,
207–08; cultural revolution 145; Communist International
advocated by, 217–18; Luxemburg denouncement of, 143; The
on, 207; Mensheviks as opposition Destruction of Reason, 146,
to, 40; on proletarian Jacobinism, 189n16; on historical necessity of
217–18, 240n12; What is to Stalinism, 146–47; History and
be Done, 33 Class Consciousness, 124, 143;
Leningrad Opposition, 225 “Hölderlin’s Hyperion,” 144; in
Lenin in Zürich (Solzhenitsyn), 6 Hungarian Communist Party, 142,
Leninism: purges as feature of, 15; 145; “Moses Hess and the Problem
Stalinism and, 36 of Idealist Dialectics,” 143; in
Leninism (Meyer, A.), 40, 80n19 new Hungary, 146–47; Prague
Lenin’s Last Struggle (Lewin), 36 Spring as influence on, 149; On
Leonetti, Alfonso, 154 the Process of Democratization,
Lèvy, Bernard-Henri, 58 149–50; Russian Revolution and,
Lewin, Moshe, 34, 36, 70 142; on Secret Speech, 284; Serge
Liberation Army, in Russia, 6 and, 250; Tailism and the Dialectic,
Liebknecht, Karl, 138 143; as Thermidorian, 142, 144; as
The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky Western Marxist, 142–50; The Young
(Sedov, N., and Serge), 257 Hegel, 145–46
Life and Fate (Grossman, V.), 305 Luxemburg, Rosa, xv–xvi, 97, 195n122;
Life of Galileo (Brecht), 133–34 on Bolsheviks, 212–14; on Lenin,
Linhart, Robert, 167 207; murder of, 138; The Russian
“The Lion and the Unicorn” Revolution, 212–13; Stalin compared
(Orwell), 16 to, 147–48
Literature and Revolution (Trotsky), 151
Literature of the Graveyard Macciocchi, Maria Antoinetta, 165
(Garaudy), 106 MacDonald, Dwight, 17, 24n42, 253–
Litvinov, Maxim, 294–95 54, 257, 260
Losurdo, Domenico, xxiii, 67–68, Machiavelli, Niccolò, 242n45
71, 78, 87n111, 89n129, 283–308; The Machiavellians (Burnham), 18
on Chinese Revolution, 308n2; The Magnetic Mountain (Kotkin), 75
Communist International and, 297– Main Currents of Marxism
298; Dialectic of Saturn and, 283–84; (Kołakowski), 52, 54, 84n76
on French Communist Party, 298; Maisky, Ivan, 302
Furr and, 285–86, 309n5; on Great Maistre, Joseph de, 1
Purge, 291–97; on Great Terror, Malaparte, Curzio, 288
286–91; on Moscow Trials, 286–87; Malia, Martin, xxiii, 74–75
on Nazi-Soviet Pact, 298–302; on Mallet du Pan, Jacques, xiv
Secret Speech, 284–86; Stalin, 283; Malraux, André, 103, 252, 261
on Tukhachevsky Affair, 291–97 managerial revolution, 276n31
Louis XI (King), 59 The Managerial Revolution (Burnham),
Louis XIV (King), 59 18–20, 24n42
Louis XVI (King), xxii, 56 Mandel, Ernest, 179–80, 219–20
Index 349
Maoism, 48–50; Althusser and, 169, Mathiez, Albert, 55, 214

171, 199n199; Left Opposition and, Maurras, Charles, 62
271; Sartre on, 201n285 Mayer, Arno, 67–68, 87n111
Mao Zedong, 78, 260; Hundred Flowers Mazauric, Claude, 55–57
campaign, 271 McMeekin, Sean, 89n130
Marat, Jean-Paul, 206, 209 Medvedev, Zhores, 48
Marcuse, Herbert, xxiii; on Mein Kampf (Hitler), 293
de-Stalinization of Soviet Union, Men in Prison (Serge), 251
140; exile in U.S., 138–39; Mensheviks, 208–10, 212, 263; as
Horkheimer and, 138–39, 141–42; opponents of Lenin, 40
integration of working class into Menshevism, 226; Trotsky and, 207
bourgeois society, 141–42; New Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xxiii, 95, 134,
Left movement inspired by, 141–42; 174; Adventures of the Dialectic,
Office for Strategic Services and, 110–11; on Dialectic of Saturn,
139; The One-Dimensional Man, 109–11; electoralism and, 112;
139, 141; Reason and Revolution, French Communist Party and, 106;
139, 192n87; in Social Democratic on historical necessity approach,
Party, 138; Soviet Marxism, 140; as 111–12; Humanism and Terror,
Western Marxist, 138–42 106–7, 109, 112; liberalism of, 112;
Marcy, Sam, 272 on Marxism, 106–7; on Moscow
Maretskii, Dmitrii, 225 Trials, 108–9; Sartre and, 176–77;
Margolin, Jean-Louis, 78 on Stalinism, 109; Trotsky and, 109,
Marrot, Raymond, 174 115n51; Western Marxism and, 117
Martin, Henri, 178 Mesnil, Jacques, 251
Martinet, Marcel, 251, 255 Mészáros, István, 186
Martov, Julius, 206, 212 Me-Ti (Brecht), 129
Marx, Karl, xvi, 43; Capital, 94, 128; Meyer, Alfred, 40, 80n19
on communism, 49; Economic and Meyer, Heinrich, 131
Philosophical Manuscripts, 138, Midnight in the Century (Serge),
143; The Eighteenth Brumaire of 251, 274n6
Louis Bonaparte, xii–xiii, xxii; on von Mises, Ludwig, 88n117
historical realism, xiv; Kołakowski Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 97, 300
on, 52–53; universalist doctrines of, morality, 255
83n74; Weitling and, xiii Morton, A. L., 161
Marxism: demonology and, xiii; Moscow 1937 (Feuchtwanger), 131–32
Deutscher as historian, 262–73; Moscow Show Trials (Moscow Trials),
Garaudy on, 93–95; Hitler on, 5; as 40–41; Adorno on, 119; Beauvoir
materialist philosophy, 94; Merleau- on, 172–73; Benjamin on, xii; Bloch
Ponty on, 106–7; Serge’s rejection during, 121; Brecht on, 131–33;
of, 256; in Spain, 13. See also Bukharin and, 134; Churchill on,
Western Marxism 4; Hobsbawm on, 160; Losurdo
Marxism and Philosophy on, 286–87; Merleau-Ponty on,
(Korsch), 128, 143 108–9; Partido Obero de Unificación
mass politics, totalitarianism and, 30 Marxista and, 13–15; Sartre
materialism. See historical materialism on, 172–73
350 Index
The Moscow Trial (Deutscher), 263 New Left movement, Marcuse as

Moscow Trials. See Moscow inspiration for, 141–42
Show Trials New Left Review, 272–73
“Moses Hess and the Problem of Newsinger, John, 22, 24n29, 24n49
Idealist Dialectics” (Lukács), 143 Nicholas II (Tsar), xxii
Munich Agreement, 298–299 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv, 62, 87n111
Münzenberg, Willi, 96 Nikolaev, Leonid, 287
The Murder of Sergei Kirov (Furr), 285 Nin, Andrés, 215
Mussolini, Benito, 290–91; Churchill Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 12,
on, 4; totalitarianism and, 27–28 14, 19–22; leftist themes in, 24n49;
“My Country Right or Left” literary influences on, 20; socialism
(Orwell), 16 themes in, 21; totalitarian themes
My Life (Trotsky), 126, 158 in, 19, 21
The Myth of the French Revolution Nisbet, Robert, 29
(Cobban), 55 Nizan, Paul, 172–74, 252
Nolte, Ernst, xxiii, 60–68, 87n111,
Nagy, Imre, 148 88n117; Heidegger and, 60–61;
Napoleon III (Emperor): Hugo on, xxii; on Hitler, 62, 65; Three Faces of
Stalin compared to, 233–34 Fascism, 61–63, 86n105
nationalism: internationalism as Non-Aggression Pact, 296, 299–302
replacement of, 306; in Soviet Union, “non-subversive” Jews, 3
304–08; utopianism and, 304–5 Noske, Guslav, 214
National Socialist Party, in Germany, 5, nouveaux philosophes, 57–59
61–68; race doctrine of, 62 Le Nouvel Observateur, 58
Nazi Germany: dictatorships in, 31; Novack, George, 95
Nazi-Soviet Pact, 29, 119, 127, Novy Mir, 46
298–302; Non-Aggression Pact Nyers, Rezsö, 149
with Soviet Union, 296, 299–302
Operation Barbarossa, 5, 68, 136, October Revolution, 33, 99; Pipes on,
301–2; racial genocide in, 64; 72; Stalinism and, xii
totalitarianism in, 28–30, 34–36; as Office for Strategic Services (OSS), 139
totalitarian state, 28–29. See also The Old Regime and the French
Third Reich Revolution (Tocqueville), 59
Nazism, 28–29; Arendt on, 31 Olivier, Albert, 174
Nazi-Soviet Pact, 29, 119, 127; Brecht One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
critique of, 135–36; Losurdo on, (Solzhenitsyn), 46
298–302; Sartre critique of, 173 The One-Dimensional Man
necessity. See historical necessity (Marcuse), 139, 141
Neher, Carola, 131 One-Way Street (Benjamin), xi
NEP. See New Economic Policy On Revolution (Arendt), 40
Neumann, Franz, 29 On the Process of Democratization
New Economic Policy (NEP), 33–34, (Lukács), 149–50
156, 216–17 The Open Society and Its Enemies
The New Economics (Popper), 32
(Preobrazhensky), 222 Operation Barbarossa, 5, 68, 136, 301–2
Index 351
Oppositional Bolsheviks, 70, 224 Parker, Stephen, 130

oppositional Marxism: Serge and, 28; Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista
Souvarine and, 28; Trotsky and, 28 (POUM), 13–15, 97; Orwell criticism
The Origin of German Tragic Drama of, 15; Serge support of, 253
(Benjamin), xi–xii Partisan Review, 259–60
Origins of the Great Purges (Getty), 38 Parvus, Alexander, 6
The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy The Passing of an Illusion (Furet), 59
(Talmon), 40 Pasternak, Boris, 252
Origins of Totalitarianism Patri, Aimè, 172
(Arendt), 30–32, 40 patriotism, in Soviet Union, 304–8
Origins on the Doctrine of Fascism Paulhan, Jean, 174
(Gentile), 28 Paz, Magdeleine, 251
Orwell, George, xxiii; Animal PCE. See Spanish Communist Party
Farm, 16–18; antiwar position PCF. See French Communist Party
of, 16; Burnham and, 18–19; on PCI. See Italian Communist Party
communism, 13, 22; Conquest and, Pearce, Brian, 161
69; criticism of Partido Obero de People’s Democracies, 269–70
Unificación Marxista, 15; Hess permanent revolution theory, 158
and, 23n20; Homage to Catalonia, The Persistence of the Old Regime
14; in Independent Labour Party, (Mayer), 87n111
12; Inside the Whale, 23n22; Peterson, Jordan, 83n74
Koestler and, 17, 19–20, 100; “The The Phenomenology of Spirit
Lion and the Unicorn,” 16; “My (Hegel), xv
Country Right or Left,” 16; naming Pipes, Richard, xxiii, 7, 72–74; on
of suspected communists, 20; October Revolution, 72
Newsinger on, 22, 24n29, 24n49; Plamenatz, John, 40
Nineteen Eighty-Four, 12, 14, Plato, 32
19–22, 24n49; on Republicanism in Plekhanov, Georgi, 206–7
Spain, 13; The Road to Wigan Pier, Poland, 123; Communist Party of
11, 13–15; romanticism of, 12; on Poland, 262, 291
Stalinism, 11–22; on totalitarianism, Polish October of 1956, 52
16–22; on Trotsky, 23n20. See also Political Messianism (Talmon), 82n52
Big Brother concept Pollock, Friedrich, 118
Orwell’s Politics (Newsinger), 24n29 Pol Pot, 78
OSS. See Office for Strategic Services Popper, Karl, 32
Our Political Tasks (Trotsky), 207 The Possessed (Dostoevsky), 74
POUM. See Partido Obero de
Pablo, Michel, 271–72 Unificación Marxista
Paget, Mamaine, 103 Prague Spring, 149, 163, 169, 187
Palmer, Bryan, 198n183 Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 222, 262
Panin, Dmitri, 45 The Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 150,
Papon, Maurice, 77 155, 157–59, 215
Pareto, Vilfredo, 28 proletarian Jacobinism, 205–18;
Paris Communes (of 1793–1794, of Bolshevism and, 207–8; Communist
1871), 212 International and, 215; Lenin
352 Index
on, 217–18, 240n12; Luxemburg Rights of Man, 43

and, 212–14; Mensheviks and, The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 32–
208–10, 212; Stalin and, 236–37; 33, 80nn17–18
Trotsky and, 210 The Road to Wigan Pier
Proletarian Science? The Case of (Orwell), 11, 13–15
Lysenko (Lecourt), 169 Robert, Jan, 122–23
The Prophet Armed (Deutscher), 267 Roberts, Geoffrey, 300, 303
The Prophet Outcast (Deutscher), 267 Robespierre, Maximilien, xiii, 41–42,
The Prophet Unarmed (Deutscher), 267 59. See also Jacobinism
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 2 Rogovin, Vadim, 289, 291
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, xii–xiii Rolland, Romain, 252
Rosenberg, William G., 39
Rabinowitch, Alexander, 39 Rosmer, Alfred, 223–24
racial anti-Semitism, 8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: as intellectual
Radek, Karl, 95, 262, 294 source of totalitarianism, 29;
Radical Enlightenment, 41, 43 Jacobinism and, 41–42; Social
radicalism, xxi Contract, 41
Rakovsky, Christian, 228–29, Rousset, David, 174, 176–77
245n75, 262 Rudas, László, 147
Ramsay, Harvie, 200n201 Russell, Bertrand, 187
Rancière, Jacques, 167, 170 Russell Tribunal, 187
Rappoport, Yakov, 6 Russia: Black Hundreds in, 2, 8;
rationalism, during the Bolshevism in, xxi; bourgeois
Enlightenment, xxiii revolution in, 208–9; Jewish
Ravazzoli, Paolo, 154 contagion fears in, 2; Liberation
Reagan, Ronald, 68 Army in, 6; October Revolution,
realism, of Stalin, 157–58, 219–20, 300. xii, 33, 72, 99; Stalinism in, xxi;
See also historical realism totalitarianism in, 30, 34, 36; White
Reason and Revolution (Marcuse), Armies in, 6. See also Bolshevism;
139, 192n87 communism; Stalinism
The Rebel (Camus), 104, 114n31 Russian Civil War, 2–3
Red Army, 44, 67, 177–78, 211–13, Russian Revolution, 185; Bolshevik’s
224, 260, 269 role in, 33; chauvinism of, 217;
Red Star, 306–7 despotism at end of, xxi; Five-Year
Red Terror, 211 Plans after, 37; French Revolution as
Republicanism, in Spain, 13 model for, 215–16, 231; Jacobinism
Révai, József, 147 and, 55; Jewish role in, 5; Lukács
revolutionary romanticism, 147 and, 142; Sartre as skeptic of, 172;
The Revolution Betrayed (Trotsky), Serge on, 250. See also Bolsheviks;
xv, xxiii–xxiv, 28, 79n3, 229, Bolshevism
234–35, 237–38 The Russian Revolution
Richet, Denis, 55 (Luxemburg), 212–13
Ridgway, Matthew, 178 The Russian Revolution (Pipes), 72
Ridgway Riots, 178
Rigaudias, Louis, 174
Index 353
Saccarelli, Emanuele, 158–59, SED. See Socialist Unity Party

197n156, 197n166 Sedgewick, Peter, 261
Sakharov, Andrei, 48 Sedov, Lev, 252, 275n23
salus populi suprema lex, 206 Sedov, Natalia, 252
Salvemini, Gaëtano, 252 Serge, Victor, xxiv, 47–48, 174,
Samuel, Raphael, 161 196n136, 226, 240n12, 249–62;
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxiii, 115n58; arrest of, 250–51; in Belgium, 252–
Beauvoir and, 172–78, 181; 53; Birth of Our Power, 251; The
Being and Nothingness, 181; on Case of Comrade Tulayev, 258–59,
colonialism, 183; The Communists 288; Conquered City, 251; Destiny
and the Peace, 178–80; Congress of of a Revolution, 253; Gaullism and,
Cultural Freedom and, 105; critique 261; Gramsci and, 250; International
of Algerian War, 183, 186; Critique Congress of Writers for the Defense,
of Dialectical Reason, 172, 184; 252; From Lenin to Stalin, 252; The
Dirty Hands, 181–82; existentialism Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, 257;
and, 174–75, 186; in French Lukács and, 250; Men in Prison,
Army, 174; French Communist 251; Midnight in the Century, 251,
Party and, 172, 175–76, 179–80; 274n6; as oppositional Marxist,
The Ghost of Stalin, 182–83; on 28; Partido Obero de Unificación
Maoism, 203n285; Merleau-Ponty Marxista and, 253; political exile of,
and, 176–77; on Moscow Trials, 257–58; rejection of Marxism, 256;
172–73; on Nazi-Soviet Pact, 173; support for Russian Revolution, 250;
on proletariat class, 179; rejection Their Morals and Ours, 254–56;
of Marxism, 187–88; The Search Year One of the Russian Revolution,
for a Method, 183–84; skepticism 251; Year Two of the Russian
of Russian Revolution, 172; on Revolution, 274n4
Stalin, 172, 184–86; support of Third Shalamov, Varlam, 48
World revolutions, 187; Le Temps Shatz, Adam, 77
Modernes, 174–75; on Vietnam Shultz, George, 69
War, 187; The Wall, 102; Western Silone, Ignazio, 104–5
Marxism and, 171–88; What is Silver, Brian, 70
Literature?, 180 Singer, Daniel, 77, 85n89, 262
Sayer, Derek, 200n201 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 48
Shachtman, Max, 249–50, 263, 266– Smith, Andrew, 49
67, 278n55 Snyder, Timothy, 91n166
Schapiro, Leonard, 40, 80n19 Soboul, Albert, 55–57
Schapiro, Meyer, 257 Social Contract (Rousseau), 41
Scholem, Gershom, xiv social democracy, Jacobinism
scissor crisis, 220 and, 240n12
The Search for a Method Social Democratic Party
(Sartre), 183–84 (Germany), 138
Second Empire, under Bonaparte, xii The Social Interpretation of the French
Secret Speech, of Khrushchev, 122–23, Revolution (Cobban), 55
137, 148, 165, 247n118; critiques of, socialism: Bukharin and, 246n108; in
285; Losurdo on, 284–86 Germany, 5, 61–68; as global theory,
354 Index
236; in Nineteen Eighty-Four, 21; Republicanism, 13; Spanish

Stalin and, 219; Thermidor concept Communist Party, 13
in, 235; Trotsky on, 220 Spanish Civil War, 96, 160, 173
Socialisme et Liberté group, 174 Spanish Communist Party (PCE), 13
Socialist Party of America, 277n38 The Spanish Testament
socialist realism, 131 (Koestler), 97, 102
Socialist Register, 54 Spartacist League, 3
Socialist Unity Party (SED), 136–37 Spartacus (film), 113n18
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), 249 Spartacus, as literary symbol,
Solow, Herbert, 257 97–100, 113n13
Solts, Aron, 6 Spender, Stephen, 104
“The Solution” (Brecht), 137 Spinoza, Baruch, xii, 95, 282
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, xxiii, 83n68; The Spirit of Utopia (Bloch), 121
anti-Semitism of, 6–8; The Cancer spiritual anti-Semitism, 8
Ward, 46; Counter-Enlightenment Stalin (Deutscher), 264–65
Project and, 52; as critic of Stalin (Losurdo), 283
communism, 48–49; The First Stalin (Trotsky), 238, 246n115
Circle, 47; The Gulag Archipelago, Stalin, Josef, 78; Brecht on, 130;
6, 44, 47, 50–51, 57–58, 83n74; as Bukharin and, 95, 221; collectivation
Marxist, 45–46; One Day in the Life campaign, 70; Dialectical and
of Ivan Denisovich, 46; political exile Historical Materialism, 160; as
of, 46; in Red Army, 44; religious evil, xiii; Foundations of Leninism,
faith for, 45; on Trotsky, 7; Two 246n108; Luxemburg compared
Hundred Years Together, 7 to, 147–48; military leadership
Sorge, Richard, 302 of, 303–4; proletarian Jacobinism
Souvarine, Boris, 28, 79n3, 251, 276n26 and, 236–37; realism of, 157–58,
Soviet Marxism (Marcuse), 140 219–20; socialism and, 219; Soviet
The Soviet Tragedy (Malia), 74–75 nationalism under, 304–8. See also
Soviet Union (USSR): academic totalitarianism
studies on, 34; anti-Semitism in, Stalinism: alternative to, 216–23; Arendt
189n13; Cultural Revolution in, on, 31; Bolshevism as foundation
37–38; de-Stalinization of, 140; of, 35, 205; Brecht and, 137–38; as
dictatorships in, 31; as dysfunctional demonic and evil, xii, xiv; Deutscher
bureaucracy, 39; as “Evil Empire,” as defender of, 265; Horkheimer
68; First Congress of Soviets, on, 119; Left Opposition and, xv;
209; industrialization in, 236–37; Leninism and, 36; Merleau-Ponty
nationalism in, 304–8; Nazi-Soviet on, 109; October Revolution and,
Pact, 29, 119, 127, 298–302; Non- xii; origins of, 253–54; Orwell on,
Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, 11–22; purges as feature of, 15;
296, 299–302; socialist realism as in Russia, xxi; Trotsky analysis
orthodoxy in, 131. See also Russia; of, 238–39. See also anti-Stalinist
specific countries; specific topics movements; “bolt from the
Spain: Civil War in, 96, 160, 173; blue” approach; de-Stalinization
Franco in, 51; Partido Obero de campaigns; historical necessity
Unificación Marxista, 13–15; approach; Thermidor concept
Index 355
Stalin’s Peasants (Fitzpatrick), 38 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy

State Capitalism or Totalitarian State (Brzezinski and Friedrich), 31–32
Economy (Hilferding), 28 The Totalitarian Enemy (Borkenau), 16
Ste. Croix, Geoffrey de, 161 totalitarianism: in Animal Farm,
Striker, Eva, 97 16–18; anti-Jacobinism and, 39–43;
“subversive” Jews, 2–5, 8n4 anti-Semitism and, 30; Arendt on,
Suny, Ronald Grigor, 35, 39 30–32, 86n101; Big Brother concept
SWP. See Socialist Workers Party and, 16–22; Bolshevik Revolution
and, 53–54; “bolt from the blue”
Tailism and the Dialectic (Lukács), 143 approach to, 27–34; communism
Talmon, Jacob, xxiii, 40–42, 82n52 and, 32–33; conceptual approach to,
Le Temps Modernes, 174–75 27–34; as conceptual term, 27–28;
Terracini, Umberto, 154 Counter-Enlightenment Project and,
Terrorism and Communism 27–34; Dialectic of Saturn and, 41,
(Trotsky), 211 43; failure as theory, 27; Gramsci
Thatcher, Margaret, 69 on, 155; imperialism and, 30; main
Their Morals and Ours (Serge), 254–56 features of, 32; mass politics and,
Thermidor concept, of Stalinism, 30; Mussolini and, 27–28; in Nazi
194n107, 223–28; anti-Semitism Germany, 28–30, 34–36; in Nineteen
and, 226; Bolshevik Party and, 217; Eighty-Four, 19, 21; Orwell on,
Bonapartism and, 231–32; Hegel 16–22; revisionist approaches to,
and, 143–44; Left Opposition and, 34–39; Rousseau as intellectual
224, 233; Lukács and, 142, 144; source of, 29; in Russia, 30, 34, 36.
Oppositional Bolsheviks, 224; See also anti-totalitarian movement
socialism and, 235; Trotsky and, “To those born after” (Brecht), 132–33
229–39, 265–66 Transitional Program, xvin12
Theses on the Philosophy of History Traverso, Enzo, 67, 89n129, 189n16
(Benjamin), 127 Tress, Pietro, 154
Third Reich: Auschwitz and, 64–65; Tretiakov, Sergei, 130
defeat of, 29; as totalitarian state, 64. The Trojan Horse (Nizan), 172
See also Nazi Germany Trotsky, Leon, 78, 244n66; alternative
Thirty Years After the Russian to Stalinism, 216–23; anti-
Revolution, 261–62 Stalinism of, 122; Bloch on, 122;
Thompson, Edward P., 54, 161 Brecht on, 130, 134–35; Bulletin
Thorez, Maurice, 171 of the Opposition, 263, 292; on
Three Faces of Fascism (Nolte), collectivism, 221–22; conception
61–63, 86n105 of morality, 255; expulsion from
Threepenny Opera (Brecht), 128 Communist Party of the Soviet
Thurston, Robert, 39 Union, 227; Gramsci and, 150–53,
Tito, Josef, 260 159; historical materialism and, xv;
Tkachev, Pyotr, 40, 205 History of the Russian Revolution,
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 59 126; Literature and Revolution, 151;
Togliatti, Palmiro, 151–55 Menshevism and, 207; Merleau-
totalitarian democrats, 41 Ponty and, 109, 115n51; My Life,
126, 158; as oppositional Marxist,
356 Index
28; Orwell on, 23n20; Our Political Urbahns, Hugo, 230

Tasks, 207; in The Prison Notebooks, U.S. See United States
158; proletarian Jacobinism and, 210; USSR. See Soviet Union
Red Army, 44, 67, 177–78, 211–13, utopianism: abstract, 144; nationalism
224, 260, 269; The Revolution and, 304–5
Betrayed, xv, xxiii–xxiv, 28, 79n3,
229, 234–35, 237–38; on socialism, Vakulich, Pavel, 294
220; Solzhenitsyn on, 7; Stalin, 238, Vergniaud, Pierre Victurnien, xiii
246n115; Stalinism analysis by, Victor, Pierre, 167
238–39; Terrorism and Communism, Vietnam War, 187
211; Thermidor concept and, Vitkevic, Nikolai, 44
229–39, 265–66; on Transitional Vlasov, Andrey, 6
Program, xvin12; Where is England Vlassov movement, 9n18
Going?, 124 voluntarism, xiv
Trotskyism, 48–49 Voronyanskaya, Elizaveta, 47
Trotskyist Opposition, 156–57
Trumbo, Dalton, 113n18 Walecki, Henryk, 263
Tsarist Russia. See Russia The Wall (Sartre), 102
Tucker, Robert, 34–36 Warburg, Max, 191n58
Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, 291–97 Warsaw Pact, 187; Hungary withdrawal
Tukhachevsky Affair, 291–97 from, 123, 148
Tvardovsky, Aleksandr, 46 Warski, Adolf, 263
Two Hundred Years Together We (Zamyatin), 20
(Solzhenitsyn), 7 Weil, Hermann, 118
Two Kinds of Doom (Hilgruber), 65 Weissman, Suzi, 259, 261
Weitling, Wilhelm, xiii
Ukraine, famine in, 70–71, 78 Werth, Léon, 251
Ukrainian Resurgent Army (UPA), 9n18 Werth, Nicolas, 78
Ulam, Adam, 7, 33, 40 Western Marxism: Adorno and, 117–20;
Under the Bolshevik Regime (Pipes), 72 Althusser and, 164–71; Benjamin
Under Two Dictators (Buber- and, 123–28; Bloch and, 121–23;
Neumann), 48 Brecht and, 124, 128–38; Frankfurt
The Unfinished Revolution School and, 117; Gramsci and, 150–
(Deutscher), 271 59; historical development of, 117;
United States (U.S.): Central Hobsbawm and, 159–64; Horkheimer
Intelligence Agency, 30, 104–5; and, 117–20; Lukács and, 142–50;
House Un-American Activities Marcuse and, 138–42; Merleau-
Commission, 136; Marcuse exile Ponty and, 117; Sartre and, 171–88
in, 138–39; Office for Strategic What is Literature? (Sartre), 180
Services, 139; response to What is to be Done (Lenin), 33
communism, 30; Socialist Party of Wheatcroft, Stephen, 70–71
America, 277n38; Socialist Workers Where is England Going?
Party in, 249 (Trotsky), 124
universalist Bolshevism, 4 White Armies, in Russia, 6
UPA. See Ukrainian Resurgent Army White Terror, 211
Index 357
Why the Heavens Did Not Darken Year Two of the Russian Revolution
(Mayer), 68 (Serge), 274n4
Wiesel, Elie, 7 Yegorov, Aleksandr, 296
Willikens, Werner, 66 Yeltsin, Boris, 280n80
Witness (Chambers), 74 The Yogi and the Commissar
Wittfogel, Karl, 189n23 (Koestler), 101–2
Wolfe, Bernard, 202n256 The Young Hegel (Lukács), 145–46
Workers’ World Party, 272 Yugoslav Communist Party, 291
“The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” Zalutskii, Petr, 225
(Benjamin), 125 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 20
Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 186–87 Zhdanov, Andrei, 164, 175
Wright, Richard, 104 Zinoviev, Grigory, 143, 217, 225;
expulsion from Communist Party of
Yagoda, Genrikh, 6 the Soviet Union, 227
Year One of the Russian Revolution Žižek, Slavoj, 132, 194n107
(Serge), 251
About the Author
Douglas Greene is an independent Marxist historian living in the greater

Boston area. He is also the author of two other books: Communist Insurgent:
Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017) and
A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic
Socialism (Washington: Zer0 Books, 2021). His works have been pub-
lished in Socialism and Democracy, Links International Journal of Socialist
Renewal, Cosmonaut, Left Voice, Monthly Review Online, Counterpunch,
Cultural Logic, and Red Wedge magazine. He blogs at The Blanquist: blan-
quist.blogspot.com.
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Stalinism and the

Chapter One: Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue: The

Hamlet’s universe is one of stagnation and sluggishness, it is also marked

The “dialectic of Saturn” is thus a pseudo-dialectic since it does not point

1. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, Picador, 126.

It is therefore ridiculous to say: Stalin makes “monstrous and unprov-

Jay Lovestone, “The Moscow Trial in Historical Perspective”1

become a new breed of oppressors. The stages go from radicalism to reaction

presented in detail. The chapter concludes with a consideration ofdebates

3. “Preface to the Second Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”

Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue

Nineteenth-century conservatives and reactionaries increasingly demon-

Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease. It is not a creed; it is a pestilence. It

While Churchill, condemned subversive Jews as the source behind commu-

If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with

The idea of “Judeo-Bolshevism” found fertile ground in a Weimar Germany

Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a

Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will be discussed at length else-

1. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

Truth About Hitler,” International Churchill Society. https:​//​winstonchurchill​.org​

Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue

The working-class Socialist, like the working-class Catholic, is weak on doc-

The lasting impact of Orwell’s time in Spain cannot be underestimated when

Orwell had chosen his side.

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism to answer those central

My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British

Stalinism as a Bolt From the Blue

term in his Origins and Doctrine of Fascism (1927), making totalitarian-

faculty, courses, graduate studies, academic and government jobs, scholarly

In this, as in so many other respects, Nazism and Bolshevism arrived at the

refined totalitarianism to six main features: 1) an all-embracing ideology; 2)

the vanguard party developed in What Is to Be Done? Supposedly, Lenin

Perhaps Lenin’s most conspicuous contribution to twentieth century politics is

Since the Bolsheviks were a small conspiratorial organization by design,

B. THE REVISIONIST CHALLENGE

regimes state terrorism was linked with a theory of international conspiracy: a

Lewin’s preferred alternative to Stalinism was the market socialist Nikolai

I trace lines of continuity between Lenin’s revolution and Stalin’s. As to the

A chaotic local bureaucracy, a quasi-feudal network of politicians accustomed

Getty concluded that the Soviet Union’s dysfunctional bureaucracy, lack of

‘mercilessness of the dialectics’ (Stalin) and on ‘ice-cold reasoning’ (Hitler),

is what is desired, it must be engineered through intimidation, election tricks,

What followed according to Talmon was a line of communist apostolic

disciplined vanguard organization, the violent seizure of power, a revolution-

“Know thyself!” There is nothing that so aids-and assists the awakening of

Writing to his friend Nikolai Vitkevic in February 1945, Solzhenitsyn criti-

In his seventh year of imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn returned to his ances-

After Stalin’s death and the beginning of Khrushchev’s reforms, Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn makes no attempt to be analytical or to explain why events hap-

At an even deeper level, Solzhenitsyn is not revealing anything terribly new

Finally, the promotion of Solzhenitsyn served to mask the actual diversity

Solzhenitsyn made it easier to insinuate that all socialists stood in lockstep

As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made

Throughout The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn judged all Bolsheviks and

long history, philosophy searched for answers to timeless questions such as

We rejected—as I still reject—any description of Communism or of

In his response, Kołakowski reaffirmed his position and accused Thompson

Like other counter-Enlightenment thinkers, Kołakowski condemns Marxism

A perusal of L’Humanité reveals numerous references to the Jacobin example,

Many prominent historians of the French Revolution, such as Albert Mathiez,

capitalism already dominated the countryside. Second: he claimed that the

Furet responded to both Mazauric and Soboul in an essay, “The Revolutionary

revelation on the evils of communism. A loose movement of former leftists

Truth About Hitler,” International Churchill Society. https://winstonchurchill.org