Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"Days of Infamy: Great Military Blunders of the 20th Century"
One of those mistakes was this book.
By Mark Schone
[08/30/99]

Interview
Spiritual Chapter 11
Novelist David Gates talks about his overeducated, self-tormenting characters, the genius of Dickens and the seductive pursuit of perfect taste.
By Michele Scarff
[08/27/99]

Reviews
"Coal to Cream"
An African-American writer discovers a raceless society in Brazil -- or so it seems at first.
By Casey Greenfield
[08/27/99]

Ivory Tower
Bone wars
Are we not who we thought we were? A boy's 25,000-year-old remains call into question our very roots and kick up a nasty battle among scientists.
By Juno Gregory
[08/27/99]

The Clinton marriage
At this point, we'll believe anything, but a trashy new bestseller still strains credibility.
By Jake Tapper
[08/26/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But the left's bamboozling rhetoric, Courtois maintains, is but the least of Marxism's sins. The radical tradition as a whole, he argues, has utterly failed to resolve the paradox of its own terrorism and mass violence, leaving it wide open to its current loss of credibility. Academic Marxism hardly even bothers to ask the question, except to play the usual good-cop, bad-cop routine: humane Lenin, evil Stalin, etc. But the failure of Marxism-Leninism goes deeper than its accidental betrayals. It is the ideology itself, claims the darker of the present volumes, that contributed to the stupefying tally of 100 million violent deaths under the hammer and sickle -- the largest ideology-driven genocide in history. Mass murder, they point out with numbing archival thoroughness, was made the center of the revolutionary state in 1918, not 1931, and by 1920 Lenin had killed more people than 90 years of czarism combined. He was, of course, spectacularly outdone by subsequent "Marxist" dictators who thought history was on their side.

For his chapters on the Bolsheviks, Nicholas Werth of the Institute of Contemporary History draws on newly available sources from the Soviet archives. According to Werth, the very idea of class warfare in the abstract -- such vague, antiseptic categories as "bourgeoisie," "kulaks," "counterrevolutionaries," etc. -- provided the theoretical basis for extermination. Indeed, Marx's notion of the evil "bourgeoisie" -- an amorphously vague entity Berman invokes on almost every page -- is the foundation of the original pseudo-scientific hate theory in which an entire abstract class of people is held responsible for all the ills of the race, according to putatively scientific and discernible laws.

Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin's appalling police chief, put it clearly enough in a 1917 conversation with Menshevik leader Rafael Abromovich, who had suggested moderation and gradualism. Said Dzerzhinsky:

Yes, but couldn't one change things more radically than that? By forcing certain classes into submission, or by exterminating them altogether?

In his "Defense of Terror," Leon Trotsky couched such calls to violence in the language of social science, writing, "The violent revolution has become a necessity precisely because the imminent requirements of history are unable to find a road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy." Extermination of classes, therefore, was the implacable will of history, as Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot were quick to learn.

Were Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky being good Marxists or brutishly provincial heretics? Unfortunately, Marx said different things at different times. Yet essentially Marx was not an enemy of mass violence, nor was he averse to the occasional outpouring of bloodthirsty hatred. One cannot abstract Marx entirely from his eschatology, and -- suggests Werth -- the sorcerer cannot be held unaccountable for his innumerable apprentices any more than he can be crudely lashed to them.

Being a decent "Marxist humanist," of course, Berman too dislikes the Dzerzhinskys of this world. He realizes that we cannot have a therapy-friendly Marx with the shadow of firing squads in the background. So he takes pains to celebrate the nonviolent radical tradition: the lineage of Danton; the secret brotherhoods of the 19th century; and Rosa Luxembourg, whose damning diagnosis of the atavistic Lenin expresses the gentler mores of the German Orthodox Marxists.

In a chapter called "From Paris to Gdansk," Berman evokes historian James Billington in an investigation of the radical cafe society of Paris' Palais-Royal, a maze of debating clubs, idyllic plazas and restaurants where intellectual bohemians lived "the politics of desire." Berman would claim that this is the proper milieu for the young Marx, the bookishly romantic hero of 1844. It was this free-speaking atmosphere, of course, that Gracchus Baboeuf, the firebrand of the French Revolution, had laid low with his guillotines.

In a setting curiously similar to the contemporary American academy, then, the purely verbal romance of revolution is played out. But Berman, like Billington, doesn't see the ironies. The cafe society of the Palais Royal was protected by the Duc d'Orleans -- that is, by the Ancien Regime's rule of law -- just as the academic Marxist is protected by the legal code of bourgeois democracy. By contrast, the revolution protects nobody. Depressingly, and without exception, censorship and terror follow the hoisting of the red flag. And the first to go are the academics.

In his thoughtful introductory essay, Courtois tries to explain why Marxism is still hip, why in spite of its seemingly proven track record of devastating economic failure, catastrophic violence and surreally arrogant repression it remains morally fashionable, especially, it would seem, among American academics.

There are many intractable reasons, according to Courtois. In the first place, there is the perpetually romantic notion of revolution itself and the continuing popularity of its icons: The cold, totalitarian Che Guevara is still a staple of Western adolescent bedroom posters. (Communist propaganda, admittedly, had a superb visual aesthetic. As a Western child placed by radical parents at fashionable Comsomol summer camps in Bulgaria in the '70s, I well remember the lulling narcotic effect of red flags and stirring worker hymns.)

Berman seems to confirm this theory, launching into his own paean to communist imagery, waxing lyrical over its music, its flags and its posters. For instance, although he is wary of it, he cannot quite resist the image of Lenin "riding the shoulders of the masses" under spotlights after his return from the Finland Station -- a scene of carefully stage-managed political theater. Werth provides the real story of the October coup d'état, a classic putsch if ever there was one. The tiny Bolshevik Party, with no popular mandate whatsoever, maneuvered its way into power through a mixture of armed intimidation and ruthless political betrayals. But who can deny the appeal of the image itself?

For people with almost no actual historical experience of Marxist power, moreover, this political equivalent of designer iconography is irresistible, which is why Berman ends his books by triumphantly claiming the return of Marx the icon. "The iconic," he writes, somewhat cryptically, "looks more convincing than the ironic."

Next page | We are all candidates for the guillotine

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon