A Fateful Triangle E-Book

Leonid Luks

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 368

Beschreibung

The twentieth century began with a deep identity crisis of European parliamentarianism, pluralism, rationalism, individualism, and liberalism―and a subsequent political revolt against the West’s emerging open societies and their ideational foundation. In its radicalism, this upheaval against Western values had far-reaching consequences across the world. Its repercussions can still be felt today. Germany and Russia formed the center of this insurrection against those ideas, norms, and approaches usually associated with the West. Leonid Luks’s essays deal with various causes and results of these Russian and German anti-Western uprisings in twentieth-century Europe. The book also touches upon the development of the peculiar post-Soviet Russian regime that, after the collapse of the USSR, emerged on the ruins of the Bolshevik state that had been established in 1917. What were the determinants of the erosion of the “second” Russian democracy (after the first of February 1917) that had been briefly established following the disempowerment of the CPSU in August 1991, and that existed until the rise of Vladimir Putin? Further foci of this wide-ranging collection of essays include the specific ‘geopolitical trap’ in which Poland—constrained by its two powerful neighbors—was caught for centuries. Finally, Luks explores the special relationship that all three countries of Central and Eastern Europe’s ‘fateful triangle’ had with Judaism and the Jews.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Part I. Bolshevism and Fascism: Two Faces of Totalitarianism

The Totalitarian Double Revolution of the Twentieth Century (1917–1933) and Its Ideological Roots—An Outline

Bolshevism, Fascism, and National Socialism— Related Opponents?

Part II. Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia in Search of Identity

Farewell to Class Struggle

The Aggrieved Great Power: Russia after the Crimean War and after the Dissolution of the Soviet Union— A Comparative Outline

“Weimar Russia?”—Notes on a Controversial Concept

A “Third Way”—or Back to the Third Reich?

Part III. Poland and Its Neighbors

Polish Perceptions of Russia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Aleksander Wat about the Janus-Faced Russia*

The German Question in Unofficial Polish Journalism of the 1970s

Polish Antiauthoritarian Revolutions, the Euromaidan, and Putin’s Neo-Imperial Doctrine

Part IV. The Jewish Question

The Craving for “Organic National Unity” and the “Jewish Question” in the Writings of Fedor Dostoevsky and Heinrich von Treitschke

Cosmopolitanism as an Anti-Jewish Stereotype under Stalin

The Catholics in Postwar Poland and the Jews

Concluding Remarks: Does Russia Belong to Europe?

Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

Copyright

Introduction

The twentieth century, which ended with the triumph of the liberal-democratic systems in Europe, had begun with an extraordinarily deep identity crisis of parliamentarism and liberalism, with a revolt against pluralistic societies and their values. In its radicalism, this revolt exceeded all previous revolts of this kind. Germany and Russia formed the center of this insurrection against the values that are usually associated with the West. It should, however, be pointed out that this revolt had been inspired in Germany, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other hand, by diametrically different ideas. In Germany, the insurrection against the West was directed primarily against the ideals of the French revolution, the so-called ideas of the year 1789. These ideals were opposed by the ideas of the summer of 1914. At that time, Germany seemed to have created a kind of alternative to the Western model: the German society clarified by the war experience of 1914. In the spirit of optimism of the summer of 1914, the Germans seemed to have overcome all political, denominational, social, and regional tensions. The otherwise torn nation “no longer knew any parties.”

Despite the fact that Germany belongs to the West, the discussion of many values constitutive of the occident is an old topos of German cultural history. In their acrimonious rejection of the so-called Western decadence, many German authors did not differ too much from the Russian Slavophiles. Helmuth Plessner explains the German protest against the West, which reached its first climax in 1914, among other things by the fact that Germany “missed” the seventeenth century, the century in which the triumph of Enlightenment and political humanism began. Not least this “missed” century had turned Germany into a “belated” nation, an adversary of the West and the ideas that shaped it.1

In Russia, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the revolt against the West took place under completely different conditions. It was inspired primarily by the ideas of the year 1789. In 1917, Russia seemed to have become a new home to the ideals of 1789, the ideals that the Western bourgeoisie had, in the view of the Russian revolutionaries, allegedly betrayed.

The first section of this book deals with the causes and consequences of the two revolts.

The second section is dedicated to the development of late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, which in 1991 was built on the ruins of the Bolshevik regime that had been established in 1917. The focus will thereby be on the causes of the erosion of the “second” Russian democracy that emerged immediately after the disempowerment of the CPSU in August 1991.

In the third section of the book, I shall deal with the third part of the “fateful triangle” mentioned in the title, namely, Poland. The focus of this section will be on the so-called geopolitical trap, in which Poland—constrained by its powerful neighbors—was caught for centuries.

All three countries of the “triangle” had a special relationship with Judaism. This problem will be the subject of the fourth section of the book.

1 Plessner, Helmuth: Die verspätete Nation. Stuttgart, 1974.

Part I. Bolshevism and Fascism: Two Faces of Totalitarianism

The Totalitarian Double Revolution of the Twentieth Century (1917–1933) and Its Ideological Roots—An Outline1

The “short” twentieth century is one of the best documented epochs of history. Yet, it poses much more riddles than many periods of antiquity and the Middle Ages, whose sparse documentary remains can be reconstructed only with difficulty. One of the greatest riddles in this context is the question of the causes of the unprecedented breach of civilization that took place in the first half of the twentieth century and befell old cultural nations, which had been so proud of their great poets and thinkers, their brilliant writers, and artists. How could Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago happen? This question has shaken the European self-conception down to the present day.

The National Socialist genocide of the Jews and the Bolshevik sociocid are sometimes referred to as “Asian” acts (Ernst Nolte). This definition, however, is misleading, for the totalitarian regimes that had been established in Asia usually imitated European models. The birthplace of modern totalitarianism is, without doubt, in Europe, with Russia and Germany forming the center of revolt against the traditional European image of mankind, which had been shaped for centuries by the notions of the Old and the New Testament.

Many analysts of the totalitarian regimes regard these political phenomena as the most radical manifestations of nihilism and see in their nihilistic destructiveness the greatest danger for the European civilization. Hermann Rauschning, who, after a temporary flirtation with the NSDAP, became one of Hitler’s most vehement critics, defined in 1938 the National Socialist revolution as “The Revolution of Nihilism.”

Rauschning was wrong. The fanatical faith and the missionary zeal of the totalitarian ideologies had a much more catastrophic effect on the societies they ruled than the cynical unfaith of the nihilists.

When looking at the genesis of the totalitarian double revolution of the twentieth century, one must not forget that it occurred after a 150-year-long triumph of the progressive-emancipatory processes in Europe. There were occasional interruptions of this triumph march, but only for a short time. Almost after every interruption, the advance of the Europeans accelerated toward the equality of rights and the liberation from paternalism of every kind. All the more puzzling is the fact that this irrepressible desire for freedom of the Europeans could be so abruptly controlled that so many of them could be turned into tame, submissive subjects of the recently established despotisms and into mere little screws of the gigantic totalitarian mechanisms. Not least due to this reason, the Russian novelist Vasilii Grossman, who died in 1964, gives in his great novel Life and Fate another concise label to the twentieth century—the century of camps, World Wars, extremes and much more: the “century of subservience.” And indeed, the triumph of the totalitarian regimes that characterized the first half of the twentieth century would have been unthinkable without the willingness of countless Europeans to accept the totalitarian dictatorships. Grossman writes:

[G]igantic masses were the obedient witnesses of annihilation of the innocent. But not only witnesses. When it was commanded, they gave their voices for annihilation, they expressed their approval of the mass murders with their vocal bluster. In this boundless subservience of men, something quite unexpected appeared.2

How does Grossman explain this anthropological revolution; the fact that “the violence, which was glorified by the totalitarian social systems, proved capable of paralyzing the human mind on whole continents”?

The novelist traces this triumph of totalitarianism back to the moralizing attitude inherent in totalitarian ideologies to the fact that “the crimes” committed by totalitarian regimes had been portrayed as “the highest form of humanism, that they [had divided] men into worthy and unworthy ones.”3

This breach of civilization, which took place in the heart of Europe, had apparently occurred over night—in a short period between 1917 and 1945 resp. 1953 (the year of Stalin’s death). This “suddenness,” however, is misleading, for breaks usually occur gradually. Even the “century of subservience” resp. the camps had its long history. It was preceded by a revolt against the traditional European image of man.

This revolt had the character of a double revolution. The destroyers of the foundations on which the Christian-Jewish culture is based entangled the defenders of this culture in a war on two fronts. They were attacked in the name of equality, justice, and international solidarity as well as that of the hierarchical-elitist principle, the irreconcilable national egoism, and the idea of race.

Thereby these were the influential representatives of the educated class and not the generally feared “masses” who battled values such as tolerance and humanity with particular radicality. Not the revolt of the masses but the revolt of the intellectual elite caused the greatest blow to European humanism, wrote the Russian exile historian Georgii Fedotov in 1939.4

European humanism suffered the greatest setbacks in its confrontation with two schools of thought, which were creatures of the otherwise liberal nineteenth century, but were to develop their destructive potential only in the totalitarian twentieth century: the class struggle theory and the raciology. The groundbreaking writings of both schools of thought—the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and the Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races by Count Gobineau—came about almost simultaneously. Both writings stood on the border of two epochs—romanticism on the one side and the scientific-positivistic age on the other—and were characterized by beliefs of the two epochs. Not least this synthesis gave them an extraordinary vigorous power. Romantic concerning Marx and Engels as well as Gobineau was the belief in a “Golden Age” of mankind and a godlike, incarnated savior. At the same time, however, they were convinced that they had discovered the iron laws of history and provided scientific justification. And with this belief in science, they already participated in the positivist zeitgeist, which began to take shape around the middle of the nineteenth century.

Both Marx and Engels and Gobineau were historical determinists, yet with a difference: The concept of the authors of the Communist Manifesto was characterized by boundless optimism and that of Gobineau by boundless pessimism.

Marx and Engels were convinced that they had found in the proletariat a new savior, who was free from the original sin of the exploitation of man by man. Almost nothing would connect the industrial proletarian with the old world characterized by class domination. That is why he is also predestined to destroy this sinful world and lead mankind into the “Golden Age” of classlessness.

The savior of Gobineau was the white race:

[History] shows us, according to Gobineau, that civilization originates from the white race, that it cannot persist without the help of this race, and that a society is only insofar great and sparkling as it preserves the noble group that it owes its existence.5

What Gobineau, however, was extraordinarily depressed about was the permanent decay of this “most noble” human species, resulting from its racial mixing with other races: “Mixing, mixing everywhere, mixing forever,” complained one of the founders of raciology bitterly.6 The “Golden Age,” which for Marx and Engels would dawn in the “bright future,” had been for Gobineau in the grey past:

The Brahmans of primitive India, the heroes of the Iliad […], the warriors of Scandinavia […] give us a higher and more brilliant idea of humanity […] than the peoples, hybrid a hundred times over, of the present day.7

However, for the racial purist Gobineau, not even the “Aryan” “heroes of the [past] great epochs” were immaculate: “And the blood even of these was no longer pure.”8 For Gobineau even worse were the future prospects of mankind: it decays and degenerates unstoppably, because the white race loses its purity by continual mixing.9 At the end of this decay process, the final demise is waiting. But even worse for Gobineau than the inevitable decay of mankind was the following perspective:

What is truly sad is not death itself but the certainty of our meeting it as degraded beings.10

The gloomy predictions of Gobineau and other advocates of decadence theories11 were particularly widespread at the turn of the century. Pessimistic at that time were, however, not only the advocates of raciology but also their Marxist opponents.

The proletariat, with which Marx and Engels linked their chiliastic hopes, had not proved themselves as a revolutionary class. Events such as the revolt of the Paris workers from June 1848 or the Paris commune remained on the fringes.

A successful industrial revolution constituted, for the classics of Marxism, the prerequisite for the victory of the proletarian revolution. The actual historical development, however, proceeded according to a precisely opposite scenario. Only where the industrial revolution did not occur in time, the revolution inspired by the Marxian ideas had a chance. Not in the highly developed industrialist countries, but in the agrarian and emerging countries, the postulates established by the Communist Manifesto were realized. In the highly industrialized West, on the other hand, there was a gradual mitigation of the class antagonisms, which Marx had, at that time, regarded as unbridgeable. The industrial revolution now came to fruition, and the workers had more to lose than their chains. Not least for this reason, Eduard Bernstein tried—with his The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy from 1899—to reconcile Marxism with reality as he saw it. The collapse of capitalism is not imminent, he noted. Therefore, the SPD should abandon its revolutionary phraseology and work together with the liberal bourgeois forces to reform the existing society.

Although Bernstein’s theses were condemned by the majority of the leaders of the Socialist International, the growing influence of the supporters of the evolutionary goal in the Western working-class movement could not be overlooked.

What contributed to the mitigation of the class antagonisms in the West, however, was not only the successful industrial revolution but also, indirectly, Marx himself, or to be more precise: the movement that was inspired by him.

Owing to their organizational strength, the most important Social Democratic parties of the West now, at the turn of the century, achieved considerable political and economic successes.

But then, it was precisely the successes of the workers’ movement that fueled visions of doom and gloom in the camp of the defenders of the present social relations. Liberal democracy was, in their view, not capable of reacting adequately to this new challenge. An extraordinarily deep identity crisis of parliamentarism and liberalism occurred. This crisis was associated with a growing skepticism of the Western intellectual circles against the positivist belief in progress and science as well as against rationalist concepts. A search for alternatives to the parliamentary-democratic system began, the pursuit of a renewal or revitalization of the ruling elites (V. Pareto and G. Mosca). The critics of parliamentarism and liberalism completely dismissed the search for compromises, which are so characteristic for the liberal age. They advocated decisional solutions, the elimination of the political opponent, if necessary with the help of the so-called direct violence. The so-called revolt of the masses was talked up by many right-wing critics of liberalism as one of the greatest dangers of European civilizations. And they also regarded the organized workers’ movement as the most dangerous form of this revolt. To counter this threat looming from below, some antiliberal groups, such as the Social Darwinists, wanted to revise the traditional moral concepts. In their view, not the weak and the underprivileged should be protected from the strong; on the contrary, the strongest and the best should be protected from the weak, that is, from the masses. For the Social Darwinists sympathy with the weak was a completely obsolete demand. They idealized the laws of biological nature and tried to transfer the law of the strongest into society.12

Many militant opponents of modernity regarded the Jews as the leaders of the “revolt of the masses.” They allegedly incited the “obedient” lower classes to fight against estatist privileges and social injustices. The sentence “The Jews are our misfortune,”13 formulated by Heinrich von Treitschke in 1879, was a common place for many groups at the turn of the century—and this throughout Europe. Treitschke’s proposals for solving the “Jewish question,” however, were not radical enough for many of his “epigones.” Treitschke, despite his growing anti-Semitism, had not entirely freed himself from liberal ideas and repeatedly emphasized that he did not question the Jewish emancipation as such.

For such remnants of liberal thought, the successors of Treitschke had nothing but ridicule. They believed that the solution of the “Jewish problem” required entirely new methods. An author advocating such a new form of handling Judaism with particular vehemence was the English–German publicist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose pseudoscientific elaborate The Foundations of the 19th Century, published in 1899, would become a kind of compulsory reading for many pseudointellectual circles in the German Reich and far beyond.14

In an almost Marxian manner, Chamberlain believed that he had identified the cause of all causes, the prima causa, of all historical processes, namely, the life-and-death struggle between the “highly creative” Aryan resp. Indo-European race and its “enemy”—Semitism resp. Judaism.

As an ardent admirer of Richard Wagner, a Wagner biographer and leading publicist of the “Bayreuth Circle,” Chamberlain continued his master’s campaign against Judaism, which ascribed the “moral decline” of the modern world to the influence of Judaism. Chamberlain also quoted the Wagnerian definition of Judaism, which the composer had described as the “malleable demon of the decay of humanity.”15

However, Chamberlain’s polemic exceeded Wagner’s program that had been particularly evident in the text Judaism in Music. Wagner had called on the Jews to renounce their Jewry: “Becoming together with us man, means for the Jews first and foremost to stop being Jews.”16

Chamberlain thought that such a self-dissolution of Judaism was impossible because the inner nature of the Jews was irrevocably determined by their race.17

Even if Wagner had, under the influence of Gobineau whom he had met in Rome in 1876, begun to believe more and more in racial determinism,18 in the case of Chamberlain this belief almost attained the form of an adamant dogma. However, the fact that it disguised itself as a “science-based theory” was what gave the greatest advantage to this axiom of faith.

The pseudointellectual readers of Chamberlain, longing for simplistic solutions, were incredibly grateful to the author for his “key” to the unraveling of the “meaning of history.”19 On December 31, 1901, Wilhelm II wrote to the author of the Foundations:

There you come, with a spell you bring order into chaos, light into the darkness; goals, which must be aimed and worked for; explanations for the inky suspected, paths which are to be pursued for the salvation of the Germans and thus for the salvation of humanity!20

Cosima Wagner, who reacted similarly euphoric to the book, wrote to Chamberlain on February 15, 1902:

Your “Foundations” [are] the most read book in all classes, and during the meeting, which we had with his Majesty, the Kaiser said repeatedly: “Chamberlain thinks the same.” You have become influential, my friend.21

Chamberlain’s book, however, contained not only “simple” answers to the most complicated questions in the history of mankind but also a guide to action. He showed what means had to be applied to alter the course of history, which is characterized by the struggle between the Aryan and the Semitic race, in such a way that it is beneficial for Aryanism. He passionately argued the case for a “Carthaginian” solution of the Semitic question, that is, for the elimination of the Semitic danger according to the Roman model of 146 BC:

[...] one thing is as clear as the noonday sun; if the Phoenician people had not been destroyed, […] mankind would have never seen this nineteenth century, upon which, with all due recognition of our weaknesses […], we yet look back with pride […]. The least mercy shown to a race of such unparalleled tenacity as the Semites would have sufficed to enable the Phoenician nation to rise once more; in a Carthage only half-burned the torch of life would have glimmered beneath the ashes, to burst again into flame as soon as the Roman Empire began to approach its dissolution […], and yet we should need to be blind or dishonest, not to confess that the problem of Judaism in our midst is one of the most difficult and dangerous questions of the day.22

Because the Jews, after the obliteration of the Phoenicians, were supposed to be the greatest remaining threat to the Aryan race, Chamberlain was more than grateful to the Romans for their “preliminary work,” for their other destructive action, which was for the history of the world maybe as unimaginably important as the destruction of Carthage—the destruction of Jerusalem: He believed that without this act, Christianity would have hardly ever been able to free itself from Judaism.

Chamberlain could only scorn all the talking about “humanitarianism” of the modern Europeans. After all, this had—in his view—only made the rise of Judaism possible:

The Indo-European, moved by ideal motives, opened the gates in friendship: the Jew rushed in like an enemy, stormed all positions and planted the flag of his, to us, alien nature […] on the breaches of our genuine individuality.23

How Chamberlain intended to take action against this—from his point of view—“deadly threat,” he had already described in the chapter on the extermination of the Phoenician nation by Rome:

The least mercy shown to a race of such unparalled tenacity as the Semites would have sufficed to enable the Phoenician nation to rise once more.24

Chamberlain introduced a number of arguments as to why the Jewish race should be relentlessly fought against:

[Their] existence is sin, their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life.

[The] basis of Jewish religion includes […] a direct criminal attempt upon all the peoples on earth.

[The] criminal hopes [of the Jews isolate] them from suffering, striving and creating humanity, [make] them […] inevitably the enemy, open or secret, of every other human being, and a danger to every culture.

We cannot understand Judaism and its power, as well as its ineradicable tenacity […], until we have recognised his demoniacal genius and can explain its growth. Here it is a struggle of one against all.25

Thus, Chamberlain in fact denies the Jews their human existence. In her book on the predecessor of National Socialism, Doris Mendelewitsch summarizes Chamberlain’s image of the Jews as follows:

Everything that constitutes a real human being the Jews are lacking; they are uncreative, merely evil rationalists and materialists, their “religious instinct” is stunted.26

With this dehumanization of the Jews, Chamberlain in fact anticipated the racist thesis of the “life unworthy of life,” which the National Socialist regime would later implement with an unparalleled efficiency. It is not surprising that the author of the Foundations received a special place in the “pantheon” of the NSDAP.27 Chamberlain was, according to the memoires of Hermann Graf Keyserling, “undoubtedly the most important spiritual pioneer of the National Socialist movement.”28

The utopia of the “Carthaginian” solution of the Jewish question, conceived by Chamberlain at the threshold of the twentieth century, was, on the European continent, almost fully realized in the middle of this century of the camps. It was part of the essence of this century that it was the time of the realization of several utopian dreams that had once been considered unfeasible. In the nineteenth century, the Russian philosopher Nikolaj Berdjaev wrote in his book The New Medieval Age, one had often complained that utopias are beautiful but cannot be realized. In the twentieth century, humanity was confronted with a completely different experience. Utopias are much easier to realize than initially assumed. The question that now arises is how to prevent the realization of utopias.29

And, in fact, the protagonists of the utopian outlines shaped the political events of the twentieth century, especially in its first half, and pushed the liberal-democratic opponents, who did not think in “end-time categories” and regarded politics as the “art of the possible,” into the defensive. What became the symbol of the realized utopia were the concentration camps, which, according to the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, were “the models and plans for the totalitarian society […] The camps were the testing ground for societies, which should be organized like concentration camps.”30

Around 1940, almost the entire European continent was dominated by two totalitarian Leviathans who sought to realize their utopian visions, which had been developed in two programmatic writings that occurred around the turn of the century. In addition to the Foundations of the 19th Century,this is Lenin’s What Is to be Done?, published three years later.

***

When Lenin wrote his work, the entire Second International, founded in 1889, was in the midst of the revisionist struggle, which showed that the utopian energies that the Marxist movement still had in the early decades were gradually drying up. The Social Democratic parties of the West were increasingly concerned with parliamentary, unionist, and local political questions and by no means with revolutionary ultimate goals. This descending into everyday life and routine incensed many social democrats, who still felt obliged to the legacy of the Communist Manifesto. Nevertheless, they became increasingly isolated within their respective parties.

The visions of the Communist Manifesto on the abolition of private property and the establishment of a classless society inspired only radical margins of the workers’ movement around 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War. Three years later, however, representatives of this direction became sole rulers in one of the largest empires on earth. The utopia came to power, one could say with the book title of the Russian exile historians Nekrič and Geller about the history of the Soviet Union.31

After the decline of the revolutionary wave in the West after 1849, the revolutionary center of the continent moved to Russia. Here an uninterrupted intensification of political conflicts and a polarization of society were taking place, as Marx and Engels had predicted for the West. Despite this, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the tremendous Tsarist apparatus of power seemed almost omnipotent and absolutely superior to the revolutionary groups of all stripes. In this constellation, Lenin’s What Is to be Done? was written, which would later turn out to be as important and defining for the Marxist movement as the Communist Manifesto.

Like Chamberlain, Lenin believed in the regularities of historical development, but at the same time—here again paralleling the author of the Foundations—wanted to influence the spontaneous historical processes voluntarily. These analogies in the reasoning of the two authors are astonishing when one considers that Chamberlain was inspired by a world view characterized by unlimited pessimism (Gobineau’s thesis of the permanent process of decay of the white race), whereas Lenin had inherited an unlimited optimism from Marx (the inevitable victory of the proletarian revolution).

With his “Carthaginian model,” Chamberlain, as already mentioned, wanted to demonstrate that Gobineau’s pessimistic view was unfounded. The decay of the Aryan race can be stopped when the most important cause of this process—the Jewry—will be defeated. Thus, he called upon the Aryan race to create, with a superhuman effort of will, a racial “paradise on earth.”

Lenin, too, was inspired by the vision of a paradise on earth; this time a social one that, similar to Chamberlain, should be built through an effort of will. He categorically rejected evolutionary solutions of the labor question, which the Western “revisionists” and their Russian fellowmen were supporting in order to improve the economic situation of the proletarians gradually. This would only distract from the actual goal, the destruction of the existing society. Lenin’s hopes of salvation were not dissimilar to those of Marx and Engels, as these can be found in the Communist Manifesto.32 He, too, seemed to proclaim in an almost Early Christian manner: Salvation is near. But who is the savior? Marx and Engels had linked their messianic hopes with the proletariat. Both turned out to be false prophets. The aim of the overwhelming majority of industrial workers was by no means the establishment of a “realm of freedom” instead of a class society, but modest affluence within the existing society, which they indeed achieved at the turn of the century, at least in the West. They could hardly be won over for the utopian plans of ivory tower intellectuals.

Lenin, who spent the years between 1900 and 1917 with a brief interruption in the Western exile, could observe this “erosion of the utopian” at close range. The disappointment about the Marxian “savior” is the common thread of What Is to Be Done? Spontaneously, on their own, the proletarian masses only attained a “trade-unionist” consciousness, Lenin explained. The Socialist consciousness, the striving for the creation of a new, unprecedented world, could be imparted only by an avant garde:

[The] workers couldnot have a Social Democratic consciousness. This could only be brought to them from the outside.33

Lenin dreamed of a strictly disciplined, centrally managed conspirational organization of professional revolutionaries: “Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!,” Lenin wrote in What Is to Be Done? in 1902. One year later, this party emerged as the result of a division of the Russian Social Democrats into a Bolshevist and a Menshevik wing. Fourteen years later, the Bolshevik party achieved what Lenin had predicted in 1902—“overturn[ing] the whole of Russia.”34

***

The circumstances, which led to the fact that the totalitarian groups of left-wing and right-wing provenance were able to move from the sociopolitical periphery to the center of power—first in Russia, then in Germany—cannot be described here, as this would be beyond the scope of this chapter. In the second part of this chapter, I would rather like to address the totalitarian movements in the so-called regime phase; the question as to whether certain features of the totalitarian groups, which became evident in the course of the development phase, solidified or further developed in later, more mature stages.

First, I want to go into the typical tendency of totalitarian movements to dehumanize their opponents, deny their humanity. The representatives of the former Russian upper class, for example, were demoted to people of the “second category” right after the Bolshevik seizure of power. The Soviet Constitution of July 1918 deprived them of both active and passive electoral rights. The representatives of the so-called exploiting class were poorly provided for during the Russian civil war and were generally given ration cards of the lowest category. They were repeatedly charged with special taxes—the so-called contributions(for instance, they had to pay 10 billion rubles to the state in October 1918). Within the scope of the obligation to work, they had to do the most base and servile work. An important part of the “Red Terror” at the time of the civil war were the “hostage-takings”—arbitrary arrests of countless citizens, who were regarded as a sort of human pledge by the terror organs. Acts of resistance were often answered with mass executions of hostages. Among those hostages, who were first executed, were the members of the formerly owning class.35

The Bolsheviks were convinced that they would succeed in building, almost overnight, a social order that is based on the ideals of equality, justice, and fraternity, and that this would happen because they, allegedly, represented the interest of the overwhelming majority of humanity—the “exploited classes.” They considered the deprivation of rights, the expropriation, and elimination of the so-called exploiters as a sufficient prerequisite to build a social paradise on earth. Lev Trockij writes in his memoirs that he recalls very well how Lenin, in the first period after the Bolshevik seizure of power, repeatedly emphasized: “After half a year we will have achieved Socialism and be the most powerful state on earth.”36 Thus, the Bolsheviks became victims of their own utopianism. The Russian philosopher Semen Frank describes utopianism as a typical heresy, an attempt to save the world with the help of the human will. Since the utopian violates the structure of creation and the nature of man, his intentions are doomed to failure. He declares war to both creation and human nature and turns from a supposed savior into a bitter enemy of the human race.37

When the stubborn reality opposed the Bolsheviks’ radical transformation, they declared more and more groups to be enemies of the working class and questioned their humanity. In addition to the representatives of the former upper class now also the rich peasants, the so-called kulaks were included in this category. In August 1918, Lenin stated:

The kulaks are the most brutal, ruthless and savage of exploiters [...]. During the war these bloodsuckers grew rich out of the poverty of the people [...]. These spiders grew fat at the expense of [...] the starving workers. [...] These vampires have been gathering the landed estates into their hands [...]. Ruthless war must be waged on the kulaks!38

This declaration of war of the Bolsheviks to the owning classes began to be extended to the so-called small private owners, that is, to the overwhelming majority of the Russian peasantry, which constituted about 80% of the population. In April 1918, Lenin accused them of unbridled egoism and described them as resolute enemies of the proletariat:

Their weapon is the undermining of everything that the proletariat decrees and endeavors to bring about the matter of building an organized, Socialist economy.39

And what about the party that had violently stifled the huge emancipatory process that Russia had experienced from the abolition of serfdom in 1861 to the October Revolution and incapacitated the subjugated society entirely? In the first decade and a half after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik party had become an omnipotent demiurge, capable of creating within a very short time a new, unprecedented social order and a new man. In a society forced into line, however, such a self-confident party represented a foreign body. From 1936 to 1938—during the time of the “Great Terror”—this foreign body was integrated into the social organism as a whole and demoted to a compliant tool in the hands of the leadership. Now also the Bolsheviks were subjected to the process of dehumanization, which they themselves had initiated in 1917 with regard to their opponents. During the Moscow show trials of 1936–1938, many of Lenin’s closest companions, who had constructed the Soviet State, were labeled by the General Prosecutor of the USSR, Vyshinsky, as the “watch dogs of capitalism,” as “offspring of vipers” that “has to be trampled down.”40

At the Central Committee meeting in March 1937, Mikoyan, a member of the Stalinist group, characterized some of the so-called Lenin’s Guard and his former comrades as follows:

Trotsky, Zinov’ev and Bucharin embody a new type of man, who actually is no human being any more but a monster and beast that verbally defends the line of the party, but in fact, […] carries out subversive work against the party.41

After such a line of argument, all the psychological inhibitions of the Stalin leadership in their struggle against their inner-party opponents were abolished; the laws of the unwritten “Bolshevik code of honor,” which forbade the physical liquidation of inner-party rivals, completely disregarded. Those party oppositionists now fought by the Stalinists had themselves often supported the thesis that the kulaks or the members of the former upper class were beasts and not human beings. Now they experienced firsthand the painful consequences of such a diction. After the hybris came nemesis.

***

Like the Bolsheviks, the National Socialists attempted to create a new man, to whom the taboos imposed by Judaeo-Christian ethics were altogether alien. They, too, questioned the humanity of their opponents, with one difference: Since the enemies of National Socialism were primarily biologically defined, in the Third Reich, in contrast to the Bolshevik state, “false origin” could not be corrected by “correct attitude.” Transitions from one camp to another were not possible. The Jews, who were regarded as the most tenacious opponents of the Aryan race, should be completely “removed,” and since the Wannsee Conference completely destroyed.42 This purpose was served primarily by the extermination camps Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno, and above all Auschwitz-Birkenau, which were build on occupied Polish territory. As the Polish historians Jan Gum­kowski and Kazimierz Leszczyński rightly say, using the term “camp” for these institutions is misleading. Usually people were murdered just a few hours after their arrival.43 Such factories of death were unknown in the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, where people were usually destroyed by work. Thus, the uniqueness of the National Socialist terror system is symbolized by terms such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.44

The Berlin historian Jörg Baberowski, who is concerned with the comparison between National Socialism and Stalinism, asks why “the Stalinist spiral of violence did not lead to an industrially organized mass murder.”45 The author explains this by the enormous territorial expansion of the Soviet Union, allowing the regime to banish—from its point of view—“hostile elements” to remote areas of the empire. This explanation, however, is unsatisfactory. When the National Socialists began the “industrially organized mass murder” at the end of 1941, they controlled a vast territory stretching from the Atlantic to the suburbs of Moscow. No one would have hindered them from using the Jews, who had been deported to the East, as working slaves according to the pattern of the “Gulags.” The fact that they were murdered had surely no geopolitical, demographic, or economic, but primarily ideological reasons.

The Nazi regime regarded the Jews as the universal enemy, who, for the National Socialists, embodied the “old,” the so-called slave morality, which they wanted to replace with the new “master morality.” The “old morality,” that is, the Decalogue, was indeed closely connected with Judaism, so the murder of the Jews represented, for the creators of “Auschwitz,” the seemingly indispensable prerequisite for the triumph of the “new morality.”46

The relatively smooth functioning of the National Socialist extermination machinery was possible not least because the executors had, normally, internalized the National Socialist dogma that the Jews were not human beings: “Countless diseases have their cause in one bacillus: the Jew!,” Hitler said in one of his monologues. “We will be healthy if we eliminate the Jews” was Hitler’s conclusion.47

Zygmunt Bauman writes about this drive of totalitarian rulers for final solutions:

The modern mind cherishes the dream of a complete society purified from the remains of human weakness […]. To achieve this, all the obstacles that stand in the way of this dream must be eliminated—including the men and women who pose problems, who are the problem.48

And indeed, countless perpetrators in the service of totalitarian regimes regarded the extermination of millions as a kind of work of salvation. About the National Socialist executors of the murder of Jews, the American historian Erich Goldhagen (not to be confused with his son Daniel) writes:

The executors were particularly prone to chiliastic dreams, when they had just got over a massacre […]. Exhausted murderers, who were constantly haunted by […] unacknowledged feelings of guilt. For the conviction that the murdering of the Jews was a work of salvation was one of their most important pillars, it was a balm for their conscience.49

And also Stalin’s “willing executor,” Andrei Vyshinskii, described, during the Moscow show trials of 1936–1938, the elimination of the so-called enemy of the people as a salvific act.50

Similar to the Bolshevik terror, the National Socialist terror could, of course, not be restricted to a particular group of victims. Ever new circles and classes were categorized as “life unworthy of life”: the mentally ill, the Polish intelligentsia, Red Army soldiers taken as prisoners. In the News for the Troop, published by the Department of Wehrmacht Propaganda, in June 1941, one could read the following:

Everyone, who once has cast a glance at the face of one of the Red Commissars, knows what Bolsheviks are [...] It would be an insult to the animals, if one would call the features of these slave-drivers, who are at a high percentage Jewish, animalistic. They are the incarnation of the infernal, the personification of mad hatred against all noble humanity. In the person of these Commissars we witness the insurrection of the subhuman beings against noble blood.51

However, this extermination campaign, directed outward by the leadership of the Third Reich, would sooner or later inevitably direct itself inward. Among its last victims were, shortly before the end of the war, the Germans, which Hitler had stylized as the Herrenvolk. Since Hitler regarded his appearance in German history as its fulfillment, he aspired that after his death German history would come to its end.52

Hitler’s testament of April 29, 1945 does not contain a trace of regret. The real culprit for this murderous struggle was: “The Jewry!” he writes one day before his suicide. After that he pledged the leadership to “the painstaking adherence to racial laws and the relentless resistance against the international Jewry, which is poisoning the peoples of the world.”53

This unparalleled self-righteousness and inability to regret were, however, typical not only for Hitler but also for many of those believing in the Führer, and this not only before, but also after the “zero hour.” In the recently evaluated audio recordings of the conversations, Adolf Eichmann had had in his Argentinean exile with one of his fellow travelers; this expert for the question of the Final Solution stated:

If we had killed all the ten million Jews Himmler had originally quoted in his statistics”, then he, Eichmann, would say: “Great, we have destroyed an enemy [...]. I don’t regret anything. I certainly don’t eat humble pie.54

In addition, the former Soviet head of government, Molotov, who, together with Stalin, signed hundreds of so-called shooting lists and was responsible for the death of countless people, did see absolutely no reason for a vote of regret. In a conversation with the writer Feliks Chuev at the beginning of the 1970s, he stated:

The year 1937 [the year, when the Great Terror reached its climax—L. L.] was essential. It is thanks to the year 1937 that we did not have a fifth column during the war.55

When totalitarian perpetrators showed feelings of compassion, these were usually not directed toward the victims, but the accomplices. Heinrich Himmler, for instance, spoke, in his Posen speech from October 1943, whiny about the heavy burden of the SS-men, who had remained decent in their fulfilling of the “world-historical task [of] exterminating the Jewish people.”56

Listening to such inconceivable statements today, one tends to take totalitarian personalities as creatures from another planet, who have nothing in common with the European tradition. In fact, however, the totalitarian man is a European phenomenon, or more precisely, the result of one of the deepest crisis of values of European culture, which reached its peak in the first half of the twentieth century. Apart from this, the triumphs of the totalitarian movements were the result of a kind of betrayal of the European elites against the values, which had been a defining feature of European culture for centuries. In this context, the French writer Julien Benda speaks of a “betrayal of the intellectuals” (La trahison des clercs, Paris 1927). This term is much too narrow. For not only the intellectuals but also other pillars of European culture or the European system—political parties, economic and interest groups, religious communities—fell short in their involvement with the totalitarian movements of the left and the right wing. The Hitler biographer Konrad Heiden speaks, concerning the National Socialist seizure of power, of the age of irresponsibility and of the escape of Germany’s political class from responsibility.57