Vladimir Tismaneanu - World Order After Leninism

Edited by
Vladimir Tismaneanu,
Marc Morj Howard,
and Rudra Sil

HERBERT J. ELLISON CENTER FOR RUSSIAN,
EAST EUROPEAN, AND CENTRAL ASIAN STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON,
SEATTLE

in association with

Copyright 2006 by University of Washington Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tismaneanu, Vladimir.

World order after Leninism / by Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc Morj Howard, and Rudra Sil. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Essays in honor of Ken Jowitt.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-295-98628-x

1. Communist state. 2. Post-communism. 3. Political cultureCommunist countries. 4. Political cultureFormer communist countries. 5. Communism. I. Howard, Marc Morj. II. Sil, Rudra, 1967 III. Jowitt, Kenneth. IV. Title. JC474.T497 2006 335.43dc22 2006002428

This book is printed on New Leaf Ecobook 50, which is 100 percent recycled, containing 50 percent post-consumer waste, and is processed chlorine free. Ecobook 50 is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI /NISO Z39491992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

RUDRA SIL AND MARC MORJ HOWARD

VLADIMIR TISMANEANU

MARC MORJ HOWARD

GRIGORE POP-ELECHES

4Institutions and the Development of Individualism:
The Case of Western Poland after World War II

TOMEK GRABOWSKI

OLEG KHARKHORDIN

VELJKO VUJAI

7Social Dimensions of Collectivization:
Fomenting Class Struggle in Transylvania

GAIL KLIGMAN AND KATHERINE VERDERY

BARBARA GEDDES

YONG-CHOOL HA

CALVIN CHEN

STEPHEN E. HANSON

RUDRA SIL

STEPHEN HOLMES

DANIEL CHIROT

WORLD ORDER AFTER LENINISM

RUDRA SIL AND MARC MORJ HOWARD

This volume is intended as a tribute to an extraordinary scholar who has been a teacher, mentor, or colleagueas well as a friendto all of the authors featured here. Ken Jowitt is professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently Pres and Maurine Hotchkis Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Jowitt received his B.A. in 1962 from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught before retiring in 2002.

Jowitts writings have spanned three decades and influenced several generations of scholars attempting to gain some analytic purchase on the rise, transformation, and decline of communism worldwide. He is best known for his original and incisive analysis of the phenomenon most call communism, but which Jowitt insisted on calling Leninism in order to emphasize the distinctive organizational character of the party created by Vladimir Lenin. Jowitts most important contributions on the nature, transformation, extinction, and legacy of Leninism were compiled in his provocatively titled volume, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction.

Jowitts distinctive understanding of the Leninist phenomenon began to take shape in his first book, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 194465. In this book, Jowitt challenged efforts to characterize communism as either an antimodern phenomenon or an alternative route to modernity. Instead, he drew upon a detailed examination of the first two decades of Communist Party rule in Romania to suggest that Leninism represented a distinctive kind of modernity wedded to a revolutionary transformation of an economy, a society, and a political community. In a subsequent monograph, The Leninist Response to National Dependency, Jowitt went on to locate the novelty of Leninism in the charismatic impersonalism evident in Leninist party organization, as opposed to the procedural impersonalism characteristic of modern organizations in the West. According to Jowitt, Lenins genius lay in his ability to combine seemingly irreconcilable features into his party of a new type:

Lenins innovation was to create an organization and membership effectively committed to conflicting practicescommand and obedience with debate and discussion; belief in inexorable laws of historical change with empirical investigation of social development; heroic action with a persistent concern for the scientific and sober operation of an economy and society; and an emphasis on individual revolutionary heroism with an emphasis on the superordinate impersonal authority of the Party, itself the central heroic actor and focus of emotional commitment.

This synthesis represented only the genetic features of Leninism, however. In a 1978 article in World Politics titled Inclusion and Mobilization in European Leninist Regimes, Jowitt proceeded to identify and explain the developmental features of Leninist regimes. Rather than minimizing the significance of change in such regimes, as proponents of the totalitarian school were wont to do, and rather than interpreting change as evidence of deradicalization and development, as proponents of modernization theory suggested, Jowitt interpreted change in terms of three discrete core tasks that a revolutionary regime had to undertake at different stages:

transformation: a new revolutionary party wrests political and military control from a preexisting regime in order to transform the old society

consolidation: the new revolutionary regime seeks to insulate itself from the political, economic, and cultural threats of a society that still cannot be trusted

inclusion: the party seeks to integrate itself with unofficial, nonparty sectors of society without yielding its authoritative claims to the correct line.

These distinct stages not only constitute a general model of organizational change in revolutionary settings (a model that some of Jowitts students have applied to phenomena beyond the Leninist world), but they map on to the actual histories of Leninist regimes rather nicely. In the first and most authoritative embodiment of Leninism, the Soviet Union, the leaderships of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Nikita Khrushchev corresponded neatly to the changing core tasks associated with the three stages.

Under Leonid Brezhnev, however, the Soviet Union also demonstrated the distinctive challenges of the inclusion stage: for the first time, the revolutionary regime faced the absence of a combat task vis--vis society while having to simultaneously defend its mobilizational role and build an inclusive political community. With this change came threats to the partys own internal discipline, as personal ties between party cadres and members of the unofficial sectors of society set the stage for the organizational corruption of the party, marked by the erosion of the charismatic impersonalism at the heart of Leninism. Jowitt laid out how this process was concretely manifested in the case of Soviet Leninism in a 1983 article titled Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime. In doing so, Jowitt essentially anticipated the rise of former KGB chief Yuri Andropov who, during his brief stint, did indeed set out on a mission to root out corruption and revitalize the party, a mission that would soon be taken in new directions by Mikhail Gorbachev.