Leadership in East European Communism, 1945-1970

R. Barry Farrell, R. Barry Farrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351509404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Fifteen eminent social scientists from North America and Eastern Europe met under the auspices of Northwestern University's Comparative Politics Program to discuss the significance and characteristics of changes in political leadership in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union since World War II. The presentations at the conference were edited and re-written following the discussion. They are incorporated into this comprehensive analysis of political leadership in European communist countries since World War II. This volume is divided up into four parts and fourteen different chapters. Part One examines the theoretical questions of leadership in European socialist countries. Part Two provides a factual perspective, including contemporary quantitative data and biographical analysis. Part Three discusses the interaction of the leadership and society. Jan Triska's concluding overview relates specific chapters to the informal discussions at the conference. Some of the notable contributions include "Historical Development of the Communist Theory of Leadership, " Alfred G. Meyer; "The Theory of Political Leadership and the Issue of Totalitarianism, " Carl J. Friedrich; "Marxist Theories of Leadership and Bureaucracy, " Andras Hegedus; "Trends in Top Political Leadership in USSR, " Frederick C. Barghoorn; "Representation of Career Types in Soviet Political Leadership, " Frederic Fleron; "The Soviet Appartchiki, " Michael P. Gehlen. Leadership in East European Communism, 1945-1970 is essential reading for students of comparative politics and the politics of East European socialist countries and the Soviet Union.

PART ONE
Theoretical Bases of Soviet and East European Leadership

1. Historical Development of the Communist Theory of Leadership

ALFRED G. MEYER

FEW ISSUES have become as controversial in the Marxist movement as that concerning the function and form of leadership in the proletarian revolution and the socialist state. Indeed, it might well be argued that questions of leadership constitute the manifest or hidden core of most of the serious theoretical-political conflicts that have plagued Marxism from its inception. As with all such recurrent disputes in the movement, the problems of leadership faced by generation after generation of Marxists can be traced to ambiguities or complexities in the writings of the movement’s founding fathers or to misunderstandings or difficulties that developed when later generations of Marxists sought to apply the doctrine under novel conditions. I shall first present a general and very sketchy overview of the treatment Marx and Engels gave the problems of leadership and then briefly discuss various interpretations offered by major theoreticians of the movement in later decades.

Let me begin with Marx’s thoughts about leadership in capitalist society. Much of his writings deals with the political and intellectual leaders of the present and the past. Some of them are evaluated as heroes, others as villains, yet others as buffoons; and on some of the most important figures Marx’s evaluation is obviously ambivalent. Some of the great thinkers of the past, such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Hegel, emerge as tremendously important contributors to human progress, whereas most of the contemporary political figures are treated with contempt. Underneath the diverse value judgments, however, is the common theoretical framework of historical materialism, which treats all leaders, heroes, villains, and buffoons as creatures of the material conditions and the social system within which they function, and as exponents of diverse classes. All great men, Marx and Engels repeat again and again, are made by circumstances.

All leadership can be explained by circumstances, including such ludicrous examples of leadership as when “a nation of thirty-six million can be surprised and delivered unresisting into captivity by three swindlers.”¹ Leaders do not really make history, Marx never ceases asserting; instead, history makes leaders. “Every social epoch needs its great men,” he quotes Helvetius, “and when it does not find them it invents them.”² And in the same spirit Marx and Engels assert numerous times that all leaders are replaceable. If Napoleon had not been around, someone else would have played his part. Similar statements are made about Robespierre and other political leaders, and with a bit less vigor about artists, inventors, and other creative people. This deterministic appraisal does not necessarily diminish the tremendous respect Marx and Engels had for leading artists, playwrights, seminal philosophers, and revolutionary leaders. The list of such heroes emerging from the writings of the two men is extensive. Philosophers like Aristotle, Spinoza, Rousseau; artists like Rafael or Michelangelo; religious rebels like Jan Hus or Luther; as well as political leaders like Miinzer, Cromwell, Danton, and Napoleon, are described as great innovators and pathbreakers, as the outstanding representatives of the spirit of their time or their class, as the spokesmen and leaders of civilization who by their thoughts or deeds advanced the course of history. Thus the Jacobins, and especially their radical epigoni, according to Marx, brought forth communist ideas which helped plant the philosophic seeds of the new society,³ while Napoleon is credited with having cleaned Europe of much feudal residue and with creating the political and legal preconditions for capitalism.⁴

Yet in all cases (except the great artists of the past), the judgment of Marx and Engels is at best ambivalent. All of their heroes have clay feet. However great they are as innovators or cleaners of Augean stables, they are part of their own epoch and thus are victims as much as leaders. Their works are condemned to inadequacy due to the contradictions inherent in the material conditions of their time. The bolder their vision, therefore, the more likely they are to be ahead of their times, and their work will then come to grief. Bold or not, their vision itself is confined within the framework of the material conditions, and their views therefore are ideological, representing false consciousness. All leadership in the past, Marx and Engels point out, is victimized by the conditions determining it, and it inevitably plays a ludicrous role — tragic in the case of the heroes, comic in all other cases. Both the tragedies and buffooneries of leadership throughout history can be explained by this inadequacy of the great men to understand their times. Hence they parade on the stage of history in masks borrowed from the past: e.g., Luther, who “donned the mask of the Apostle Paul,” or the Jacobins, who “performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases.”⁵ And they try to achieve things that are impossible. According to Engels, Miinzer tried to achieve communism centuries before the time was ripe; and Marx repeatedly criticized the Jacobins for trying to force historic development beyond its possibilities by mere political means. In this attempt, he writes, “political life seeks to stifle its own prerequisites — civil society and its elements . . . it can only achieve this end by setting itself in violent contradiction with its own conditions of existence by declaring a permanent revolution.” But this, he warns can only end in a Restoration.⁶

The revolutionary heroes defeat their own aims because of their inevitable ignorance; the villains do the same. They may win for a short time, if they are clever, and if the material circumstances are favorable. Thus Napoleon III won because of his cynicism: Marx describes him as a swindler, a poseur, a comedian, an “adventurer who took the comedy as plain comedy.”⁷ But he could win only because he represented a class, and the largest class of French society at that: “The fixed idea of the Nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.”⁸ And in the end, he fools himself and thus prepares his doom. “Only when he eliminates his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines that he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history.”⁹ The writings of the two men are replete with similar remarks about a host of other political leaders. Marx and Engels view most of them with contempt.

In doing so, Marx and Engels expressed not only their disdain for the notables of the hated establishment, but much more their fundamental assumption that in the communist society of the near future all social differences between men would wither away, including the differences between leaders and followers, or differences in authority. Throughout their writings Marx and Engels attempted to reveal special interests masquerading as public interests; and all political inequality, all authority and leadership was a manifestation of such play-acting. For Marx, the state and the bureaucracy, institutional expressions of political leadership, are separate from the human community — alienated manifestations of civil society, hence distortions or perversions of the common interest or the General Will. Positing the spontaneous self-government of the community, in which all participate equally, as the goal toward which mankind has forever been striving, he argues that this goal is attainable now. Everyone is competent to decide questions of public concern. Hence the notion that it requires training and examinations to help govern the community — a notion on which the need for a bureaucracy as a service separate from the people is based — is denounced. Training is needed to become a cobbler, but not to be a citizen.

In a reasonable state it ought to require an examination to become a cobbler rather than an executive state official; for cobbling is a skill without which one can be a good citizen, a social being, but the necessary “state knowledge” is a condition without which a man in a state would be living outside the state, cut off from himself and from the air. The “examination” is nothing but a masonic formula, the legal recognition of citizenship, knowledge as a privilege.”¹⁰

Marx compares the bureaucracy to the clergy and scoffs at the consolation that, through examinations, every man is given the opportunity to join this leadership cadre. Marxism here appears as secularized and collectivized Lutheranism. And in Lenin's statement that under communism every kitchen help can get her turn at running the government, the idea that communist society can dispense with leadership reappears.

Let us note in passing that Engels, in his article On Authority, seriously qualifies this image of a leaderless communist society by pointing out that the management of industry will still require planning and coordination of effort, hence the subordination of men to other men. Upon entering the factory, the worker even under communism will still forfeit his freedom.¹¹ This reservation acquired tremendous importance under Lenin and his successors. One might say that it became the A and O of communist theories of leadership.

Marx and Engels were strangely ambivalent about leadership in the proletarian revolution. They praise the spontaneous heroism, wisdom, and leadership of nameless activists in the Paris Commune or the German peasant war, and they pay homage to similar qualities in numerous leading figures of these and other revolutionary events. Again and again they make it clear that all significant action in history is performed by a leader-less collective; and repeatedly they imply that the only genuine revolutions are those without leaders. Marx expressed an aversion to the personality cult in the revolution:

. . . because of aversion to any personality cult, I have never permitted the numerous expressions of appreciation from various countries, with which I was pestered during the existence of the International, to reach the realm of publicity, and have never answered them, except occasionally by a rebuke. When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society, we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes. [Later on Lassalle exerted his influence in the opposite direction.]¹²

Marx seems to have believed that the workers are better off without any leaders than with them, since most leaders lead them astray. In the Paris Commune, he argues, leaders were a hindrance rather than a help:

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declarations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water. After the 18th of March, some such men did also turn up [in the Paris Commune], and in some cases contrived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as their power went, they hampered the real action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off; but time was not allowed to the Commune.¹³

Yet in many other places Marx seems to take it for granted that the proletariat will have leaders, that these leaders come from the bourgeoisie, and that they constitute the Party of the proletariat. The task of this party and this leadership is to form the vanguard of the working class by setting a heroic example and by expressing the universal interests of the exploited rather than sectional or temporal interests. The Manifesto of the Communist Party expressed these ideas clearly, and so does Marx’s Address to the Communist League.

Engels defines Luther’s contribution as the intellectual catalyst of revolutionary Protestantism by writing that the manifold and contradictory strivings of various classes in the early sixteenth century “found in Luther’s theses a common expression around which they grouped themselves with astounding rapidity.” Such intellectual leadership, he argues, all at once gives a rebellious movement enormous power.¹⁴ Both Marx and Engels were worried about centrifugal or divisive forces within the international labor movement and stressed the need for unity, coordination, and centralization. An uncentralized insurrection, says Engels in Chapter 18 of Germany, Revolution and Counterrevolution, is bound to be ineffective. In the preceding chapter of the same work, incidentally, he warns that insurrection is an art that must be practiced with finesse as well as boldness. This too requires leadership, and he singles out Danton as the “greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known.”

In short, revolutionary leadership is important:

It is the specific duty of the leaders to gain an ever clearer understanding of the theoretical problems, to free themselves more and more from the influence of traditional phrases inherited from the old conception of the world, and constantly to keep in mind that Socialism, having become a science, demands the same treatment as every other science — it must be studied. The task of the leaders will be to bring understanding, thus acquired and clarified, to the working masses, to spread it with increased enthusiasm, to close the ranks of the party organizations and of the labor unions with ever greater energy.¹⁵

In the final analysis, the warnings against the proletariat being misled seem to be most insistent. As long as leaders are prominent, so Engels seems to argue, the revolutionary class is not yet ready for its historic role. All revolutionary movements, to be sure, start before the time is ripe. Hence they start in confusion, struggling against superior force, with prophets as their prime movers. Engels applies this generalization to socialism as well as to Christianity:

Neither of these two great movements was made by leaders or prophets — although there are prophets enough among both of them — they are mass movements. And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning, confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradictions, lack of clarity, and lack of cohesion, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning.¹⁶

The implication is, again, that prophets are false leaders. They are doctrinaire visionaries, ideologists, utopians; and such people usually end up doing the opposite of what they or their schools prescribe. They are condemned to failure. But the worst of all possibilities is that they might succeed; and the most disastrous fate of a revolutionary movement, according to Engels, is to come to power prematurely.¹⁷

These conflicting thoughts on leadership constitute the ambiguous legacy inherited by the Marxist movement around the turn of the century. But we must add one important element to it: the hero worship of the founding fathers — especially of Marx — which took hold of the entire movement. It is ironic that Engels, who wrote so snidely about prophets, should make his comrade into one. It is also ironic that a personality cult developed in a movement that denies the importance of...