Robert Conquest

Reflections on a Ravaged Century

An Excerpt, Part 1 of 2

The huge catastrophes of our era have been inflicted by human beings driven by certain thoughts. And so history's essential questions must be:

How do we account for what has been called the "ideological frenzy" of the twentieth century? How did these mental aberrations gain a purchase? What was the sort and condition of people affected? Who were the Typhoid Marys who spread the infection?

We need to develop the history and the nature of the various destructive ideologies in action. We need to consider the history and traditions of the culture that stood in opposition to them.

But before we turn to these broader themes, we need to examine the history and background of the mental arena in which the battle of ideas was fought.

Both scarcely formulated fanaticisms and closed systems of ideas are, of course, to be found throughout the past. These historical phenomena are full of lessons for our time (indeed ignorance of history is one of the most negative attributes of modern man). The basic characteristic and attraction was and is the archaic idea that utopia can be constructed on earth; the offer of a millenarian solution to all human problems. This central trend has been, at least in vocabulary, modernized. The aspirations which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spoke in the dialect of Theology, in the eighteenth century took up that of Reason, and in the nineteenth century that of Science.

With the two last, we get the delusion that our knowledge of human society is so complete that we have the power to reinvent it according to the formulae so obtained, that human affairs are in principle fully understandable and fully manipulable: a fetishism of whatever happens, or happened, to be the supposed current state of knowledge about social, economic, psychological and other phenomena.

The origin of the modern era's ideologies lay in John Locke's derivation of scholastic generalities from traditional English understandings of liberty, thus excessively rationalizing and at the same time limiting, or in a sense desiccating, the more complex reality.

At any rate, this, and the success of the physical and other sciences in England in the seventeenth century, gave the French intelligentsia the idea that everything could now be determined by Reason — in whose name the Revolution was made — with the "Romantic" input from Rousseau as part of the meld. The often argued "contradiction" between them may appear valid in a formal way, but in practice they went well together, the perfection sought being both intellectual and emotional. This unfortunate combination persisted. The "Ideas" in this sense were in any case mental, but not primarily intellectual, phenomena. Insofar as one can make the distinction, they seem, rather, to have been the verbalizations of largely emotional content.

As Alexander Yakovlev, the former Politburo member who became a stout proponent of democracy, noted in a speech on the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, "The morbid faith in the possibility of forcing through social and historical development, and the idealisation of violence, traces back to the very sources of the European revolutionary tradition."

Marx himself said that he combined German philosophical, English economic and French political ideas. And it is indeed in France that we first find Revolution in the sense of the complete destruction of the existing order, and its replacement by abstract concepts — these latter formulated by, and dictatorially enforced by, theorists with no experience of real politics. The Revolution Idea then spread over half the world.

It is sometimes argued that the social strains on the fabric of human culture, of human minds, since the Industrial Revolution have been so intense that all this has been a natural "objective" result. Since the main centers of that revolution — in particular Britain and the United States — escaped the frenzy, this cannot stand up.

Not that the advocates of free-market industrialization were exempt from a different, and less total, form of excess ideation: an extreme antiregulatory economic theory was widely held and inflicted. In the mid-nineteenth century in Britain, it was a loose coalition of traditionalists and social reformers who brought in the legislation which curbed the excesses of the first decades of the Industrial Revolution (though the dramatic fall in the death rate was also due to such works as the vast new London sewage system).

Revolutionaries, and some reformers, spoke and still speak of "radical" change. It is worth remembering that such change is not necessarily greater than that associated with the gradualist approach. Cutting the taproot is in one sense a lesser operation than lopping off a number of dead branches. To pursue the metaphor further, it is much easier to kill a tree, and requires considerably less knowledge of dendrology, than to prune it effectively. The English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution in 1776, both of them undertaken in protection of the legal and civic order, had no connotation of total and utopian change — though Marxists and others have sometimes implied the opposite.

As to the Jacobin claim to absolute democracy (with Marat as l'Ami du Peuple!), Sunil Khilnani writes of its legacy in his Arguing Revolution:

But the Revolution — and the left it created — proved to be the . . . worst enemy of these values. Democracy in its constitutional representative form — the only form in which inhabitants of the modern political world are ever likely to be durably acquainted with it — remained in quite fundamental respects unpracticed, untheorised and unloved in France. To the intellectual left, constitutional representative democracy, "bourgeois" or "formal" democracy, was a contemptible and mystifying illusion.

And, he adds, "only beginning in the late 1970s did it gradually come to be accepted [in France] as a political form in its own right, and not merely an illicit simulation of ?rue,' direct or revolutionary democracy."

Edmund Burke, in a famous passage (written, moreover, before the worst excesses), pointed out that the French revolutionaries' delusion that force could solve all problems was above all a "slothful" attempt to ignore the complexity of reality.

A century and a half later Orwell similarly remarked on the "mental coarseness" of revolutionaries, who "imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society." He might have added that there is something infantile or childish in the whole revolutionary-despotic approach, which is, in effect, based on the simpleminded attitude "If I were King . . . ," that it only needs well-intentioned people in power to solve everything by mere decree. R?my de Gourmont calls the excesses of the French Revolution "nothing but the anger of a disappointed child."

I find that high school students, imbued with or attracted to it, can easily follow the central objection (more than can be said for some at higher, or further, levels of education): How is equality to be attained? Answer: By being enforced. Who is to do the enforcing, and how can the enforcer remain "equal" to the rest? . . . And to assume the best of motives even for the initial commitment to an Idea is to be charitable: for in most humans a component of hatred for the designated oppressor has usually been quite as motivating as sympathy for the oppressed. But many, the world over, thought and still think in terms of social revolution, of a judgment against the rich and powerful which will be followed by "liberation" — another slippery general term.

"Revolution" has long been a powerful mantra. In her memoirs, Hope against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, the widow of the great poet murdered by the Stalinists, takes the view that a generation of Russian intellectuals was ruined by the word, which none of them could give up, and which prevented them from opposing the dictatorship. For what the Bolsheviks had effected was undoubtedly a "revolution," and not to be resisted.

There are men who are revolutionaries by temperament, to whom in fact bloodshed is natural. Pushkin had understood the dangers: "Those in our midst who plan impossible revolutions are either young men who do not know our people, or cruel-hearted men who place a low value on their own necks, and an even lower value on the necks of others." There were those who came to it entrapped by the Idea, and prepared to destroy "enemies of the people." Even intellectuals who are not strictly speaking revolutionaries, but who claim to speak in the interests of "humanity" as a whole, have taken sinister stands. For example, Bertrand Russell is quoted as accepting "that if it could be shown that humanity would live happily ever after if the Jews were exterminated, there could be no good reason not to proceed with their extermination" (Frederic Raphael, Prospect, May 1996).

The revolutionary believed it to be in the nature of things that dictatorship and terror are needed if the good of humanity is to be served, just as the Aztec priests believed themselves to be entirely justified in ripping the hearts out of thousands of victims, since had they not done so, the sun would have gone out, a far worse catastrophe for mankind. In either case, the means are acceptable, being inevitable — that is, if the theory is correct. . . .

Like all paranoiacs, revolutionists legitimized hatred, which they practiced effectively. They claimed to legitimize it in the interests of humanity: in this they were deceived. Or, to put it another way, the primitive search for certainty, of mental submission to revelation, of which we have spoken is melded with the primitive submergence of the individual mind into a supposed mass mind. Something of the sort may also be said of an addict's acceptance of not only terror but also lies — those two characteristics of the absolutist Idea, like Sin and Death in an earlier literature. And when it came to the Soviet Union there was what amounted to an acceptance of the old Russian distinction between transcendent Truth (pravda) and mere factual truth (istina). It was Pushkin, again, who wrote sardonically, "The lie that uplifts us is dearer to me than the mass of petty istinas."

Another great Russian writer, Dostoevsky, points out, in The Possessed, that "causes" are attractive for another reason, because they provide an excuse for behaving badly, giving "the right to dishonor," which, as he puts it, is endlessly fascinating. One of the things that gave even Stalinism its prestige in the West, even (or especially) among those who recognized that its methods were immensely ruthless, was the abstract, utopian notion that there was a certain horrible grandeur in what was going on. Men of ideas, who had profoundly considered the laws of history, were creating a new society and taking upon themselves the guilt of the necessary merciless action. Such an attitude is to be seen even in the interrogators in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and Koestler has recorded that a young Frenchman once wrote to tell him that he had become converted to Communism by that very book.

As its lowest method of justification, the excuse was, in effect, that "you can't make borscht without cutting up beets" — to adapt a remark about omelettes attributed earlier to Robespierre.

The point, surely, is to discourage the combination of a vague and self-congratulatory general goodwill towards humanity with an acceptance of systems and, resulting from that, the (often gradual) acceptance of extreme inhumanity — and falsification — if done in the name of the supposedly humanitarian concepts. For as that great historian Norman Cohn has remarked (in his Warrant for Genocide):

There exists a subterranean world, where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when that underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people. . . . And it occasionally happens that this subterranean world becomes a political power and changes the course of history.

But the world can no longer afford the rise of revolutionary-ideologues, any more than it can afford nuclear war — in part because the takeover of states by ideolaters must lead to gross inhumanity, and may lead to nuclear confrontations.

What, then, is the mental material into which they insert their ideas, like certain wasps into certain grubs? Dostoevsky writes of a human type "whom any strong idea strikes all of a sudden and annihilates his will, sometimes forever." The true Idea addict is usually something roughly describable as an "intellectual." The British writer A. Alvarez has (and meaning it favorably) defined an intellectual as one who is "excited by ideas." Ideas can indeed be exciting, but the use of the intellect might be thought to be primarily one of subjecting them to knowledge and judgment — especially on the record of our century.

Intelligence alone is thus far from being a defense against the plague. Students, in particular, have traditionally been a reservoir of infection. The Nazis won the German students before they won the German state, and there are many similar examples. In much the same way, a leading scholar of Russian affairs (Ronald Hingley of Oxford) noted during the Soviet period that basic misapprehensions about it in the West were rare among truly serious scholars, and also among ordinary people, being confined to those of fair intelligence. He commented, "For it is surely true, if not generally recognised, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavour, presupposes considerable education, character, sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed."

Eric Hoffer suggests that those who become possessed by exciting Ideas and identification with causes are often "selfish people who were forced by innate shortcomings or external circumstances to lose faith in their own selves." It might be argued that, whether through temperament or accident, some who are simply bored with the quotidian turn to Ideas as stimuli. We are told of hostesses in Berlin in the early 1930s to whom National Socialism gave "meaning to their empty lives."

Boredom is indeed a pitiable condition. And the feeling of meaninglessness, of accidie, can be devastating. Still, to compensate by abandoning reason for ideology is a desperate remedy.

Political opinion seems in fact to be largely a matter of temperament. This is implicitly admitted by Marx himself in that passage in the Communist Manifesto in which, having insisted that in general people act according to their class economic interest, he makes an exception for — Marxist intellectuals! "A portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and, in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole." As we know, most Marxist and Communist leaders have been of bourgeois origin. Marx is here admitting that their motivations are not those normally provided for by Marxism. What are they, then? Marx himself would have been the last to say that any of his followers were the intellectual superiors of Darwin or Clerk Maxwell; nor is it likely that a Communist in this century would have claimed that Molotov was the intellectual superior of Ivan Pavlov or Anton Chekhov, or Louis Aragon of Louis de Broglie or Albert Camus. But if not intellect or interest, we are left with temperament.

Even the philosopher, William James remarks, is really much motivated by temperament:

Temperament is no conventionally recognised reason; so he argues impersonal reasons for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. . . . Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes any representation of the universe that does suit it.

Pavel Akselrod, one of the leaders of the Russian revolutionary Marxists in the struggle against Eduard Bernstein and "revisionism," remarked (privately, to be sure) that "the whole thing is a matter of temperament," adding that the real objection to peaceful revolution, whatever its advantages, is that it "would be exceedingly boring" — once again that dreadful prospect. Similarly, Simone de Beauvoir, in a revealing passage in The Prime of Life, wrote that she and Sartre were "temperamentally opposed to the idea of reform."

Times of stress have produced both revolutionaries and mystics, Zealots and Christians. It would be hard to define precisely the psychological differences between the types. And indeed, there is usually a good deal of movement from one view to the other; even in the United States, one notes some of the political activists of the sixties later becoming involved in strange religious quietisms. Such changes are explicable psychologically, but hardly sociologically.

For a useful, almost classical demonstration of the revolutionary mind-warp, the motivation behind acceptance of a totalitarian Idea, we turn to an interview given by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm on "The Late Show," 24 October 1994 (see TLS, 28 October 1994). When Michael Ignatieff asked him to justify his long membership of the Communist Party, he replied: "You didn't have the option. You see, either there was going to be a future or there wasn't going to be a future and this was the only thing that offered an acceptable future."

Ignatieff then asked: "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 answered: "This is a sort of academic question to which an answer is simply not possible. Erm . . . I don't actually know that it has any bearing on the history that I have written. If I were to give you a retrospective answer which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said, ?robably not.'"

Ignatieff asked: "Why?"

Hobsbawm explained: "Because in a period in which, as you might say, 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. Now the point is, looking back as an historian, I would say that the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile. 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 then said: "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 immediately said: "Yes."

It will be seen that, first, Hobsbawm accepted the Soviet project not merely on the emotional ground of "hope" but on the transcendental one of its being the "only" hope. Then, that he was justified because, although it turned out wrong, it might have turned out right (and it was not only a matter of deaths, but also of mass torture, falsification, slave labor). Finally, that he believes this style of chiliastic, absolutist approach to reality is valid in principle.

It might be added that addiction to a historico-social analysis which admittedly proved defective could be taken to cast some doubt on the method, and hence the conclusions, of Hobsbawm's historical work — some of which, on the Bolsheviks, we shall consider in its context in a later chapter.