Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 by Hannah Arendt

Author:Hannah Arendt [Arendt, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78703-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

ANTI-STALINISM HAS become the creed of those not very large segments of the American left-wing intelligentsia whose honest interest in politics survived the severe shock of disillusion with the Russian Revolution in the thirties, and who out of despair have, in the forties, begun to doubt the fundament of Marxist socialism altogether. Although the term implies no reasoned general political approach to political philosophy, as the older terms socialism, liberalism, and communism did, it is more than a catch-all slogan invented on the spur of the moment to gather together as many people as possible for one specific purpose, people who would otherwise take the most varied stands on political matters. On the contrary, even though anti-Stalinism indicates no political philosophy, not even a definite stand on totalitarianism—one can very well be an anti-Stalinist and still believe in dictatorship, at least, if not in totalitarian rule—it indicates all the more clearly a certain climate, a peculiar atmosphere composed partly of specific American conditions and partly of more generally shared historical and biographical elements. The term points clearly to an experience in the past, common to a certain generation; yet it can hardly be a gauge of the future attitudes of those who have adopted the creed.

The preference for the term anti-Stalinism, as distinguished from anti-Bolshevism or anti-totalitarianism, is significant. No anti-Nazi would have called himself an anti-Hitlerite, because this would have meant he was a participant in the interior struggle of the Nazi party, a colleague of Röhm or Strasser* perhaps, but no enemy of Nazism. Similarly, the term anti-Stalinism originated in the interior struggles of the Bolshevik party, when, in the twenties, one could be for or against Bukharin, for or against Zinoviev, for or against Trotsky,† for or against Stalin. It was the identification of Trotskyism with anti-Stalinism that inflated these struggles within the Russian party into international issues, and this could happen only because radical movements all over the world had long since fallen so deeply under the spell and the power of Moscow that their own political discussions invariably followed specifically Russian inner-party lines. Trotskyism, as it developed after Trotsky’s expulsion from the party and exile from Russia, unfortunately perpetuated these inner struggles of the Russian party and dominated the non-conformist elements of the left-wing workers’ movements in much the same way as Moscow dominated the Comintern; and this in spite of the fact that by 1930 the actual conflict between Stalin and Trotsky was clearly outdated even in Russia, where the fight against so-called Trotskyism had lost its specific significance and was exclusively used as a means for totalitarian domination. In brief, the term anti-Stalinism does more than gather de facto all former opponents of Stalin, regardless of their present political beliefs. What is worse, its very vagueness in specific political convictions, on the one hand, and its concentration of all possible political issues in a single person—which stimulated the justifiable witticism, What will happen to anti-Stalinists when Stalin dies?—on the other, affirms, in a

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