95. Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks, p. 50.
96. Erik van Ree, “Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of National Character,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 57.
97. Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks, p. 293.
98. Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 376 and 371.
99. See Vladimir Tismaneanu: “The Ambiguity of Romanian Communism,” Telos, no. 60 (Summer 1984): 65-79; and “Ceausescu’s Socialism,” Problems of Communism (January-February 1985): 50-66. Also see Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej (București: Humanitas, 2008). The volume contains several studies on the relationship between Communism and nationalism that I published at the end of the 1980s. For a definition of national Stalinism, see Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, p. 33. For a comparative discussion about applicability of national Stalinism in the cases of Romania, Albania, Poland, Bulgaria, or the GDR, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, “What Was National Stalinism?” in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. Dan Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)f.
100. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 376.
101. I examine anti-Semitism as a political mythology in Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998, paperback 2009).
102. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, The Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 85.
103. Nicolas Werth, “Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henry Rousso (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 73-95.
3. LENIN’S CENTURY
1. Here we may remember the two epigraphs Raymond Aron chose for L’opium des intellectuels, his 1955 devastating demystification of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist dialectics. He quoted Marx: “Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by misfortune, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Then, as a counterpunctual response, he used a quote from Simone Weiclass="underline" “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people.” See Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, intro. Harvey C. Mansfield (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), p. vii. See also Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
2. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. xv.
3. See David Ingersoll, Richard Mathews, and Andrew Davison, The Philosophical Roots of Modern Ideology: Liberalism, Conservatism, Marxism, Fascism, Nazism, Islamism (Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sloan/Prentice Hall, 2010).
4. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 397.
5. Ibid., p. 455.
6. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York and Wildwood House: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 46.
7. Ibid., p. 301. Leon Trotsky uttered similar statements during and after the October Revolution. See Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, A Reply to Karl Kautsky, with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2007).
8. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), p. 48.
9. See Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
10. See chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 491-99.
11. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1959), pp. 385-86.
12. See Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, The Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 934-62.
13. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 23. Weber applies a memorable formula for this project of modern revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.”
14. Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, intro. Tony Judt (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 203.
15. For ongoing efforts to return to an alleged pristine Leninism, see Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, Slavoj Žižek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
16. Waldemar Gurian, quoted in Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (2002): 3.
17. See Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), p. 116.
18. See, in this respect, Bertram Wolfe, “Leninism,” in Marxism in the Modern World, ed. Milorad M. Drachkovitch (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 47-89.
19. See Michael Charlton, Footsteps from the Finland Station: Five Landmarks in the Collapse of Communism (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 1992); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009).
20. See Walicki, Marxism, pp. 269-397.
21. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986).
22. Lefort quoted in Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 293.
23. See my Fantasies of Salvation: Nationalism, Democracy, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
24. Harry Kreisler, “The Individual, Charisma, and the Leninist Extinction,” in A Conversation with Ken Jowitt (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 2000).