Reading Arendt in the Russian Context

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National Research University - Higher School of Economics

Reading Arendt in the Russian Context

Alexei Gloukhov, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences,

Associate Professor, School of Philosophy,

Introduction

Drawing lessons from Arendt's study of totalitarianism is a required and perplexing challenge for anyone hoping to understand the contemporary political condition in Russia. Today, Arendt's verdict on Stalin's rule remains a focal point in any meaningful discussion of Russia's past. Even those who disagree with her analysis cannot afford to neglect it; even those who believe that they have moved past Arendt often find themselves repeating her conclusions. During Stalin's era, Russia suffered and delivered more than ever. This period was the peak of existential intensity on many levels, while the rest of the Soviet period was a slow, uneven downhill slide. Even today, Russians' political imaginaries must return to those years; they are horrified and spellbound by their recollections of their predecessors' deplorable crimes and miraculous feats, respectively. However, Russia is measured against those years. Arendt was an exceptional thinker who, while diagnosing totalitarianism as an absolute evil, claimed that we could learn something from it (1958a:

viii). Not every outside observer is ready to engage with -- instead of recoiling from -- Russia's dark past. Those in Russia do not have the luxury of a choice; they must engage with and learn lessons from their collective past. They are bound to follow Arendt's lead, but doing so is not an easy task. In the first section of this paper, I will present two contextual issues that complicate the appropriation of Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism in contemporary Russia. In the second section, I will discuss this analysis on a conceptual level in relation to her notion of performative freedom, her distrust of normative reasoning, and her explanation of the condition of loneliness.

Two Contextual Paradoxes

Hannah Arendt retains a special place in contemporary Russian intellectual life, even though Russia never occupied a special place in her political theory. This asymmetry is a curious historical coincidence, but it concerns two paradoxes that we must address if we want to learn from her study of totalitarianism.

The first paradox relates to Arendt's persistent status in Russia as of the one of the most relevant political theorists. For various reasons, which will be explained below, she is a beacon of the academic political discourse in Putin's Russia. For example, see a recent issue of the Russian Sociological Review entirely focused on Arendt (Salikov, Yudin, 2018). Arendt is one of a few (if not the only) contemporary political theorists whose legacy justifies opening a dedicated rubric in a leading Russian academic journal such as this one. Within the last few years, a number of dedicated academic discussions on Arendt have been organized in Russia, such as the “Actuality of Hannah Arendt's ideas” conference (Immanuel Kant BFU, Kaliningrad, 04.12.2014), the “Hannah Arendt: Freedom and Responsibility” conference (HSE, Moscow, 19-20.03.2015), the “Hannah Arendt's Legacy and the Present Day” panel discussion (IFRAN, Moscow, 20.10.2016), the “Hannah Arendt on the Limits of the Permissible: Public Sphere, Pluralism and Responsibility” workshop (Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, 31.03.2018), and the “Hannah Arendt: Problems of Translation, Problems of Interpretation” work-shop (IFRAN, Moscow, 06.06.2019). Two recent publications evaluate the state of Arendtian studies in Russia: Salikov, 2017; Salikov, Zhavoronkov, 2019. In the latter paper, a bibliography of Russian scholarly publications on Arendt cites more entries for the 5 years of 2013-2018 (24 in total) than for all the previous years combined. My paper on Arendt (Gloukhov, 2015) that is not listed there, apparently because it is in English, is also to be counted in the first group. Understandably, the reviewers complain that the state of Arendtian studies and translations in Russia still leaves much to be desired, while granting that she enjoys the status of a first-class thinker and that the interest in her legacy is constantly growing in Russia (Salikov, Zhavoronkov, 2019: 136, 139). As I see it, this level of academic activity focused on a single contemporary thinker's legacy is a lot by Russian standards; the very fact that such a fundamental approach to establishing Arendt's studies in Russia currently being undertaken has no parallel with any other contemporary political theorist, at least for now. Arendt certainly would have been equally critical of the nationalist politics of the contemporary Russian state as she was of the imperialism of European countries in the first two chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958a). Another obvious point of contention is her consistent equation of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which is on the verge of being prohibited by a Russian law. However, these features are ideological, which means that they are less important for her own essentially structural theory.

Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism is difficult to absorb in its entire complexity. On the one hand, she was clear about her final verdict of condemning totalitarian rule as an absolute evil. On the other hand, totalitarian movements fascinated her as a new and unprecedented form of political organization. The duality of her approach escapes some Russian readers who tend to confuse her position with that of undeniably liberal thinkers, such as Isaiah Berlin. Nothing could be further from the truth since Arendt and Berlin shared no mutual intellectual affection (Berlin, Jahanbegloo, 1991). Instead, Arendt found her intellectual peers among dubious anti-liberal thinkers, such as Carl Schmitt. Undeniably, she had ideological differences with Schmitt. They were on the opposite sides in the war against Nazism; they may have had different geopolitical theories (Jurkevics, 2017). See also Filippov, 2015, where the author finds fundamental differences but also a complementarity in their concepts of the political since Arendt places the locus of the political inside the community, whereas Schmitt places it outside of the community. However, their affinity runs on a deeper non-ideological level of tacitly shared axioms of how to approach thinking about political reality. This explains why in The Origins, of all places, Arendt finds an occa-sion to praise Schmitt's “very ingenious theories about the end of democracy and legal government” that “still make arresting reading” (1958a: 339). She refers constantly to the crucial passages in his 1934 publication State, Movement, People (Schmitt, Draghici, 2001), where we can witness a gradual drift of her research focus from a familiar topic of imperialism to the conceptual discovery of totalitarianism, her major theoretical break-through. Today, one can also cite her ample marginalia found in the books from her private library. Schmitt was one of her most extensively studied authors; her marginalia in Schmitt are only outnumbered by those in the great three -- Kant, Plato, and Heidegger. Unsurprisingly, the contemporary Russian intellectual environment, which favors both Schmitt and Arendt, does not have much use for Berlin's ideas, even though he was the only one of these three thinkers who was genuinely interested in Russia's fate. dogmatism totalitarianism freedom arendt

In some essential respects, Arendt's vision of political reality is at least compatible with the mainstream political mindset which is currently shared both by the Russian government and its opposition. To be sure, Alexey Navalny, who is a lawyer by education, relies essentially on available legal instru-ments in his day-to-day efforts to advance his cause. What I have in mind is rather visions of an ideal political community circulating among Russian intellectuals, where friendship, solidarity, and spontaneity play a more important part than justice, the rule of law, or representative democracy. Giving names is an unfortunate idea for many reasons; therefore, I suggest reading this statement at least as a warning. The most significant feature of this vision is a tacit disregard for the normative dimension of politics. Although Arendt observed the cause of the dangerous atomization of the masses in the dissolution of traditional political and moral structures, she never proposed a decent legal system as the political ideal. Benhabib calls it “the missing normative foundations of Arendtian politics” (2003: 193-198). According to her, “the absence of a justification of the normative dimension of the political, that is, of the question of social and political justice in [Arendt's] work, is deeply disturbing.” A recent body of research works exploring the normative dimension of Arendt's theory may seem to contradict my conclusion: Goldoni, McCorkindale, 2012; Isaac: 1996; Gundogdu, 2014; Birmingham, 2006. However, the crucial legal innovation suggested by Ar-endt was “human right to have rights”, which clearly transcends the scope and purpose of any particular legal system, thus confirming rather than contradicting this thesis; see also (Gaffney, 2016). In the book On Revolu-tion, Arendt directly connects the loss of the political spirit, “the lost treasure”, to establishment of a firm legal framework (2006: 198-229). The point I am making in this paper is less about Arendt in general and more about considering such statements uncritically as helpful against the backdrop of Russian history where the rule of law has always been under attack from other sources. In contrast, her account of freedom values those spontaneous deviations from norms and laws, which unsurprisingly enjoys an enthusiastic reception in Russia, where the very concept of the rule of law has never been taken for granted. Confronted with this local reality, in which some essential aspects of Arendt's theory are almost universally appreciated along the political spectrum, raising doubts regarding whether drawing lessons from her analysis can challenge the established status quo is reasonable.

Arendt neither stated nor resolved the problem surrounding the good political regime, because for her, political life was always about freedom and never about governance. She sharply contrasted the two ways of thinking about politics by comparing the miracle and exceptional phenomenality of freedom with the routine and stultifying character of political administration. The practical downside of her approach is that she discourages thinking about change in the most basic and everyday circumstances of political and social life. By prioritizing exceptional events, Arendt seemingly pushes us to surrender control of our ordinary lives to somebody else. In this respect, she finds natural allies in autocrats who want nothing more than to take on such responsibilities. As such, despite her approach's presumable opposition to the current political regime, students of Arendt are hardly able to challenge it. In contrast, to the extent that it concerns the question of how to change the most basic features of social life, following Arendt may even help reaffirm the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary Russia. Arendt certainly is not the preferred theoretical source of inspiration of the ideologues of the contemporary Russian state who would rather rely on more nationalistic local authors such as Ivan Ilyin or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, the current political regime has proven its ability to think out of box in such matters. In the 2000s, the president's administration encouraged a surge in interest in postmodern philosophy by correctly predicting that its theoretical radicalism would eventually render it politically harmless. After 2016, it has become increasingly obvious that the Russian state has been cynically exploiting the same loophole intrinsic to the key arguments of French theory and of Arendt, e.g., distrust of the truth, reason, science, justice, human rights, the rule of law, and the social contract. This brilliant generation of thinkers believed rather naively that, because they did their best to uproot the entire topic of governance, their theories could never be abused for political profit. By always being more chaotic than rational since the very beginning in the Middle Ages, the Russian state has constantly been contradicting those who look for answers in terms of binary oppositions between politics of the extraordinary and normative orders (Kalyvas, 2008).

The second paradox relates to our desire to learn about Russia's past from a political theorist who was never particularly interested in Russian affairs. Although the matter is complicated and disputed, it must be systematically disentangled.

To begin with, this rule has a few notable exceptions. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was an extraordinary historic event. Being sensitive to the “miracles” of history, Arendt never tired of emphasizing the importance of “the new form of government” born through the Russian Revolution, what she called “the system of people's councils” (1958b: 216). In what follows, it is essential to note that her interpretation of people's councils downplayed the impor-tance of social justice in their agendas (Medearis, 2004). However, people's councils were not a unique feature of Russian history since the soviets shared this distinction with several other instances of spontaneous revolutionary organizations, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, the German Rдte of 1918, and the Hungarian people's councils of 1956. Another possible reason for Arendt to focus primarily on Russian material was the legacy of Vladimir Lenin -- an unrealized promise of a revolutionary alternative to totalitarianism. Arendt singled out Lenin among the leaders of 20th-century mass movements to suggest that a different path for this unprecedented form of political organization was indeed possible. However, she was not consistent in making this point, and the historic material, including Lenin's untimely death, could not provide her with conclusive evidence to support this conjecture.

Irrespective of the importance that we assign to Arendt's study of Russian material in The Origins, a much richer parallel treatment of German affairs has always overshadowed it. Initially, Arendt planned to study only the genealogy of Nazism. In her first draft, the first two parts of the book were intended to present the continuous historical development from European anti-Semitism and imperialism to the emergence of Nazism. She came to understand Nazism as an unprecedented form of political power that was matched only by Bolshevism no earlier than 1947. Nazism and Bolshevism were the only two species of totalitarianism in history. Thus, the published book provides few logical ties between the first two parts of her research on anti-Semitism and imperialism and the third part on totalitarianism. Additionally, these loose ties show that Arendt's material on Russia was not part of her initial project and was only a subordinate topic in her final research (Tsao, 2002). Only one section of her book was exclusively devoted to the Soviet situation; this final chapter was included in a second extended edition after Stalin's death. Even here, with the chapter being entitled “Epilogue: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution”, Arendt was more interested in the recent popular uprising in Soviet Hungary than in the power games within the Communist Party elite in the Soviet Union. Judging by these remarks, Arendt never predicted “the thaw” of the Khrushchev era (1958a: 14). The imbalance in her treatment of the Communist and Nazi sides of the totalitarian story was obvious to Arendt as she planned to expand her study after the first publication of The Origins. However, what she identified as “the most serious gap” in her book was “the lack of an adequate historical and conceptual analysis of the ideological background of Bolshevism” rather than a lack of information from inside the Iron Curtain (Kohn, 2002: v). Arendt laments the lack of source material in her review of Waldemar Gurian's book on Bolshevism (1963). Since the only sources are Soviet propaganda, Gurian's strategy was “to concentrate on an analysis of the ideology, avoiding factual narrative as much as possible” (Arendt, 1994: 394). Her research plan involved tracing the totalitarian features of Bolshevism to its philosophical roots, thus returning to the ideas of Marx. She drafted almost 1000 pages for this unrealized book, an excerpt of which was posthumously published as Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought (2002). Her way of addressing the “gap” in her analysis confirms the general thesis of her book from the outset, i.e., that totalitarianism was an outcome of Western modernity.

However, in demonstrating certain aspects of totalitarianism, Arendt ultimately found the Russian sources to be of paramount importance. For example, she attributed the quality of “selflessness” to members of the totalitarian party who were more concerned about their party membership than their own lives, and this quality was clearly modeled on the behavior of the Old Bolshevik Guard during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. The indiscriminate use of violence and terror, even against agents of the secret police, was unique to Stalin's `great purges' and, according to Arendt, did not compare to the Night of the Long Knives in Germany. Finally, in the first edition, Arendt's account of concentration camps was primarily based on a 1947 review of conditions in Stalin's gulag, and, to a limited extent, the Nazi camps in Germany, although the scope of the genocide in death camps in Eastern Europe was neglected (Tsao, 2002: 601). In general, Arendt regarded Stalin's Russia as much more advanced in its totalitarian rule than Hitler's Germany. Given the very limited source material available, she based this conclusion on her overall estimates (1994: 348). She had a theoretical concept of “fully developed totalitarian rule” in mind where all the local features disappeared and certain “identical structures reveal[ed] themselves.” In her presentation of this concept in The Origins, she alternately relied heavily on both German and Russian material. However, as I show below, the key ingredient in this concept, the totalitarian movement, receives its structural perfection only against the backdrop of the Nazi regime.

Arendt's confidence that all the local features would disappear in the final stage of totalitarian rule correlates with the research method that she was forced to adopt due to her limited access to reliable sources. The theoretical concept of totalitarianism was the envelope that held the factual material emerging from two different directions. With regard to this method's reliability, she made a paradoxical but fully justified decision to take the statements of both Stalin and Hitler literally. A powerful hermeneutic argument informed this decision, to which I will return to later, because not even Arendt appreciated its full potential. Since totalitarianism makes reality correspond to the fiction of the leaders' prophecies, their statements become effective truths and the only truths from the internal perspective of the regimes. After Arendt developed a theoretical concept for the purpose of comparison and collected the highest effective truths in the hierarchy of statements, she could reasonably claim to have built her analysis on a solid foundation (338-339).

Arendt's methodical considerations seem to contradict this paper's argument. For her, discussing the Russian and German cases separately or seeking answers rooted in local historical and political conditions made no sense. Only the final structures of the fully developed totalitarian rule counted, and they were identical. Totalitarianism was an exceptional historical development in both Germany and Russia. However, these anomalies had common historical roots, and they were not exclusively caused by local conditions, but they were conditioned by the hidden forces of the same shared European legacy. Arendt would write that “The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition” (1958a: ix). For Arendt, the totalitarianism or the political reality of Stalin's regime pointed to nothing specifically Russian. Therefore, discussing Arendt's application of her general theory to the Russian case is more appropriate than proposing that she had studied a specifically Russian form of totalitarianism. This point is worth stressing whenever we try to reverse-engineer and apply her conceptual framework to contemporary Russian conditions.

I will address this issue by showing that her structural analysis is a double-edged sword which will not immediately provide us with a meaningful answer. In fact, her ultimate litmus test for political regimes -- the challenge of human freedom -- was entirely different. In her essay On the Nature of Totalitarianism, a long but unfinished draft of the 14^th chapter of the second edition of The Origins, she states from the very beginning that “In order to fight totalitarianism, one need understand only one thing: Totalitarianism is the most radical denial of freedom” (1994: 328). She starts with the diagnosis which she proceeds to explain further in structural terms. Strangely, Arendt does not refer to mass murders as proof of crimes against freedom, as if condemning the regimes purely on the grounds of the incalculable number of victims was too simplistic for her. Numbers do attest to the evil of the regimes, but their denial of freedom is what explains their radicalism. However, Arendt understood freedom in structural terms as a political event that is extraordinary even in a world without genocide. The most radical denial of freedom destroys the very possibility of its existence. It deprives human life of meaning, after which the logical machinery of totalitarianism condemns to death whatever has already been made meaningless. Although her explanation of the initial thesis is complete, it creates the illusion that the explanation is more important than the diagnosis, that is, a structural analysis may contribute more to understanding the destruction of meaning than the destruction itself. Contrary to what is initially obvious, freedom becomes conceptually dependent on the structure of its denial.

Before I demonstrate that freedom is different from what may be proven with a structural analysis, I must lift Arendt's ban on referencing to specific Russian material. In doing so, the same structural features that may have different meaning in a different context are revealed.

In what was mentioned above as an explanation of the compatibility of Arendt's language with mainstream Russian political discourse, the profound negligence of the law was not limited to the post-Yeltsin era. Indeed, the “liberal” Constitution of 1993 so generously enumerated various civil rights, including the right to a favorable natural environment (in the country that covers one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area), that nobody really trusted that these rights were sacrosanct. This legal carelessness resembles an intentional inversion of the minimalist concept of basic rights, which such liberals as Isaiah Berlin envisioned to guarantee the robust protection of human freedom under the most adverse conditions.

A comparison of this attitude toward the Russian Constitution with the crucial part of Arendt's analysis of totalitarian rule is even more striking. Both the Soviet and Nazi regimes formally retained their respective constitutional frameworks. Stalin forced the Soviets to adopt a new constitution in 1936, the first year of the “great purge”, and Hitler never discontinued the effects of the Weimar Constitution of 1918. For Arendt, the dual character of the political reality where informal dynamics fully dominated but coexisted with the normative order was a distinct feature of totalitarianism because it was absent in the typical modern Western state. Perhaps this moment is the most unfortunate in her analysis because this is where her strategy of a parallel treatment of Russian and German material becomes clearly problematic. Although the proverbial German adherence to Ordnung supports her argument, nothing comparable to this normative foundation of everyday life can be found in Russian history. By contrast, the chaos in the earliest years of the Russian state is legendary. In their invitation letter to Varangian aliens, the Slav tribes perfectly captured the persistent problem that would plague Russia in the centuries to come when they wrote that “Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us” (Cross, Sherbowitz-Wetzor, 1953: 59). Neither the first Varangian princes nor subsequent generations of Russian and Soviet rulers solved the problem of the unstable political order in this part of the world. Stalin's era was no exception to this rule. Arendt prevents us from confusing a totalitarian state with ordinary despotism. Far from being defined as a triumph of Draconian laws, Stalin's regime was the most dynamic and unprecedented period in Russian political history. The exceptional centuries-long persistence of the same political predicament can only have one reasonable explanation, that is, this predicament had become the local definition of normality rather than the exception. The most successful of Russian rulers never considered the lack of order to hinder their ambitions; on the contrary, the intentional creation of chaos and disorder became the inexhaustible source of power for them, marking the precise point at which the Russian and German political traditions diverge toward the extreme limits. The irony of this history is that many of the Russian rulers were German-born or became Germanophiles. However, almost all of them were quick to learn that an extraordinary intervention might bring about success much more easily than a systematic procedure. The term “manual control” epitomizes the most effective way of governing under the current leadership. There is nothing comparable to the normative legacy of ancient Rome that can be found in the foundation of the Russian state. For centuries, the common language of communication, which is the basis of the rule of law, was undermined by the coexistence of the French-speaking elite and their mostly Russian-speaking, uneducated slaves. The golden era of the emerging normative relations in the final decades of the Russian Empire did not last long enough for the legal system to become a vehicle of justice for the millions of peasants and proletarians. Thus, although the totalitarian dynamics of Stalin's regime were exceptional in their intensity and scale, they did not project as dramatically from the historical background as the German case did. As the primary way of thinking about political life for Russian politicians and intellectuals under different regimes, this disregard of the norms and formal procedures of justice is a striking feature of Arendt's political ideal which has little use for the normative concept of politics that is typical in the modern liberal state.

This first section of the paper dealt with a rather curious fact of asymmetry between Arendt's paramount place in contemporary Russian political philosophy and the subordinate place of Russia in her theoretical universe. In the second section, some key Arend- tian theoretical ideas are discussed more substantially against the complex backdrop of the Russian political experience.

Conceptual Problems