Alexis de Tocqueville: L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution. Paris: Éditions AOJB, n.d.

Alexis de Tocqueville: The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Arthur Goldhammer translation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

 

 

In each of his major books, Tocqueville presents his reader with a mass of carefully observed detail and carefully researched information. One might easily be overwhelmed, lost in these forests of fact-trees. Complicating matters further, Tocqueville’s literary style conveys nuance of judgment, subtlety, even a certain reserve. Like his admired Montesquieu, he wants not only to make you read; he wants to make you think. Tocqueville understands the risks to which he exposes his reader, and always works to minimize them when he introduces his book to him. And so, at the beginning of Democracy in America, he carefully points out that the title is exact; this is a book about democracy, not about America. He takes America as the “sample democracy,” the best example of a civil society no longer ruled by persons who claim to be ‘born to rule’ the mass of men who lack such title. Democracy means civil-social equality; the regime that rules such a society may be republican, as in America, or despotic, as in France under Napoleon. But in either case the society is egalitarian, and America exemplifies democracy, in that sense of the term. Those who ignore Tocqueville’s guidance characteristically complain that there’s not enough in the Democracy about natural rights, that he never mentions the Declaration of Independence, and so on. But he isn’t writing about America, fundamentally, at all. As he tells you, if you read his introduction.

For the same reason, the Foreword to The Old Regime and the Revolution offers indispensable guidance to understanding a shorter but in some respects more complex book, a book written by a Frenchman about France, primarily if far from exclusively for the French. For such a task, discretion is de rigeur. Tocqueville must provide his fellow-citizens with exactly the right point of entry.

He tells them what his book is, in three ways. He identifies its genre; he states its purpose; and he formulates its problématique—both the problem it addresses and the solution it offers. An important part of the solution is to bring the reader to understand that there is no permanent solution to the problem of politics, and why that is a good thing. 

What his book is, I. Respecting the genre of his book, Tocqueville says it isn’t a history of the French Revolution but a “study” of it. This recalls his call in the Democracy for “a new political science for a world altogether new,” a civil-socially democratized world. “Democracy” or civil-social equality causes things to happen, and is itself a cause; a study in political science begins with a search for the causes of political things.

The causes of the French Revolution are difficult to find. In 1789, he recalls, the French attempted to sever their past from their future. “Unbeknownst to themselves,” they failed, but they did succeed in obscuring the causes of the revolution by that attempted severance. As a “study” of the revolution, his book aims at removing this ignorance and replacing it with knowledge—a more sober ‘enlightenment,’ as it were, than the original one, which contributed so much to the ill-judged ambition of historical severance, in the effort to sweep away all that was old in the old regime and to make the world anew. The most radical of the revolutionaries eventually produced a new regime and a new civil Society. However, the sentiments, habits, and ides that constituted this new civil society were materials gleaned, unintentionally, from the debris of the old civil society of the old regime. In considering the laws, the customs, and the spirit “of the government and the nation” under the old regime, Tocqueville will show how its institutions actually worked, how the social classes related to one another, the conditions and feelings of “unseen” elements of the population, and the true basis of French opinions and customs. The primary sources for his inquiry are the cahiers de doléances, the ‘grievance books’ wherein the complaints of the French people were collected by government officials of the old regime. In undertaking this study, “Everywhere I found the roots of today’s society firmly implanted in this old soil.”

What his book is, II. The purpose of the book is to show why this “great Revolution” erupted in France, not elsewhere in Europe, where it was also “in gestation.” Further, why did the revolution “emerg[e] fully formed from the society that it was to destroy”? And how could the old monarchy have fallen so suddenly and completely? 

What his book is, III. Tocqueville does not intend his study to be merely descriptive. The revolution had causes, including its purposes, but so does his book. He intends to identify a problem and to solve it. The book’s  ‘problématique‘ consists of the contradiction between the revolutionaries’ original intent—to destroy privileges but also to “recognize and consecrate rights,” an intent animated both “the love of equality and that of liberty”—and its result—a nation whose “single wish” was “to become equal servants of the master of the world,” Napoleon, who offered them equality without liberty. That is, the French went from monarchy to republicanism back to monarchy, now a monarchy tricked out with false popular sovereignty expressed by fraudulent votes. The goal of Tocqueville’s consideration of this problem is “a portrait that would be not only strictly accurate but also perhaps educational”—indeed, civic-educational. He will call attention to the “manly virtue” seen in the republicans who revolutionized the old regime, “a true spirit of independence, a yearning for greatness” animated by French faith in themselves. A serious consequence of the revolution, however, was to weaken that spirit and that yearning. Under Napoleon, France became bigger, temporarily, but the French became smaller, and have stayed that way. Can the French make France great, again? Tocqueville would inspire them to try, even as Charles de Gaulle would do, a century later. 

The principal impediment to the restoration of French greatness is “narrow individualism,” that tool of despotism which inclines men to stop being citizens, to devote themselves exclusively to enriching themselves and so to “divert attention from public affairs.” However unjust, the castes, the classes, the guilds, and the families of the old regime taught civic virtue by placing every French man and woman within civic associations that required them to think beyond themselves. Tocqueville does not imagine that the French of the old regime, of any regime anywhere, will not feel all the passions connected with self-interest. But only despotism “furnishes the secrecy and the shadow which allow cupidity to thrive and permits one to amass dishonest profit in defiance of dishonor.” “Without despotism these [debilitating passions] would be strong; with it they rule.” 

The civic education Tocqueville offers his readers teaches that only political liberty can counteract narrow individualism, by what he calls in the Democracy the art of association, and also by a sense of, and pride in, the nation, patriotism. Political liberty educates and elevates what Plato’s Socrates identifies as the three parts of the human soul. Political liberty brings citizens to substitute higher passions for the love of material comfort; it thereby moderates the bodily desires. Political liberty supplies ambition with higher goals than those of mere ‘captains of industry’; it thereby directs thumos, the spirited part of the soul, toward the common good. And only political liberty “can create the light by which it is possible to see and judge the vices and virtues of mankind.” By this he means that you can see people clearly, see them for what they are, only if they are free to speak and to act in public hearing and in public view. Political liberty benefits logos, the reasoning part of the soul, allowing it to take its bearings in its inquiries into human nature and sharpening its dialectical powers in public debate.

By strengthening all three parts of the human soul, political liberty alone can form the great citizens who comprise a great people. Despotism can have good private citizens and even good Christians, inasmuch as Christians amass their treasure not in this world but in heaven. But “the common level” of minds and hearts will steadily diminish so long as civil-social equality and a regime of despotism remain conjoined. “I thought and said as much twenty years ago,” when he wrote Democracy in America.

Proponents of despotism, Bonapartists then and now, share one thing with himself, Tocqueville astringently suggests. “What man is there, by nature, with soul so base as to prefer depending on the caprices of another man, the same as himself, instead of obeying laws which he himself contributed to establishing, if his nation seems to have the virtues necessary for making good use of liberty?” And indeed even “the despots themselves do not deny that liberty is excellent; only they want it solely for themselves, insisting that all the other are unworthy of it.” The difference lies not “in the opinion one ought to have of liberty,” but “in the greater or lesser estimation one makes of men.” Thus “it is rigorously accurate to say that the taste one shows for absolute government is in exact proportion to the contempt one professes for his country.” Tocqueville asks for more time before “converting myself to this sentiment” about France.

The second and third sections of the study, Books II and III, address the purpose of the book as stated in the foreword: why the revolution occurred in France, not elsewhere (beginning in II.i, continued throughout); why it emerged fully formed from the old civil society (beginning in II.ii, also continued throughout; and why the monarchy collapsed so rapidly and completely (beginning in III.4, continuing to the end of the study). Linking the Foreword to those longer, main sections, Book I consists of five chapters which describe the key elements of the revolution, the causes of which he will identify and analyze in Books II and III.

Book I’s first chapter shows why a genre other than a history, why a study founded on the new political science, is necessary. He describes the contradictory judgments of the revolution observers ventured at its inception; even in their confusion, all agreed that it was “extraordinary.” But a topical approach, an attempt to gather facts and even judge a complex course of events during or immediately after it takes place, will not only miss important facts unavailable to contemporary observers, it will usually lack an adequate analytical framework for understanding the facts, even when a larger collection of them has been assembled by the researcher. More, without such an analytical framework, the distinguishing feature of a “study” not a history, the task of selecting the relevant facts will be fatally handicapped. Even a man of Edmund Burke’s genius, Tocqueville will argue, didn’t quite ‘get it right,’ because he could not.

In the second chapter Tocqueville links the genre of his book—a “study” aiming at determining the causes of the revolution—to the purposes of the revolution itself, the ends the revolutionaries pursued. Eliminated one of the causes of confusion about the revolution he had alluded to in the previous chapter, he denies that the fundamental purpose of the revolution was either to destroy religious authority or to weaken political authority. Although the revolutionaries were indeed in the grips of “irreligious passion,” this was “incidental.” The Enlightenment philosophes who gave the revolutionaries their ideas propounded “the natural equality of human beings”; this was the “substance” of the revolution. Its anti-religious passion therefore aimed at the inegalitarian institutions of the Church, its hierarchy, not at Christianity itself. Since then, Christianity has revived, precisely because democracy comports with it. As readers of the Democracy know, Tocqueville identifies Christianity as the first way in which the idea of human equality penetrated the opinions of the generality of men, beyond the coteries of philosophers. As for political authority, in the end the revolution didn’t issue in anarchy. On the contrary, it enhanced governmental centralization, “replac[ing] the aristocrats with functionaries,” with administrators drawn from the bourgeoisie.

In the third, central chapter of Book I, Tocqueville shows how this religiosity and this statism combined. That is, having established that the revolution was not irreligious but religious in its own way, and having remarked its statist character, he shows how the revolutionaries combined these two features into the new French civil society and regime. The French revolution was a political revolution that proceeded in the manner of a religious revolution. Like the newer, universalist religions—Christianity and Islam—although the revolution began in France it finally had “no territory of its own”; it provided men with “a common intellectual fatherland.” He compares it to the Protestant Reformation, which also proceeded by preaching and propaganda. Unlike the ancient religions, described a few decades earlier by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, universalist religions “are rooted in human nature”—in man as such. Indeed, there had been “no great religious revolution before Christianity” because all religions were local, tied to places, lands and temples held sacred by their adherents. The French Revolution did in this world what Christianity did for ‘the other world’ or ‘the next world,’ making it a place every soul yearned to be, a place for “the regeneration of the human race.” The “new kind of religion” proposed by the revolutionaries demanded the worldly equivalents of heavenly bliss and the terrors of hellfire. It is in view of the universalist ambition of this creed that Tocqueville titles his book L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, not L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution Française.

The book’s purpose, as stated in the Foreword, is to explain why the Revolution occurred in France, not elsewhere.  Before the revolution, Tocqueville observes in I.iv., Europeans had the same ruling institutions, the institutions of feudalism, and they were now weak and listless, lacking vitality or spirit. Aristocracy suffered from “senile dementia”; political liberty had become “sterile.” A new “spirit of the times” prevailed, as feudalism lost its “grip on the hearts of the people.” Civil society remained vital, but not feudal institutions and laws. The modern state had drained these of their life, increasingly placing all its subjects into a condition not of feudal hierarchy but of equality before the law. The monarchic regime drew the aristocrats off the land and into Paris, the capital of the ever-centralizing French state, distracting them with frivolities while forging the administrative ligatures designed to rule the land and the people on it from that capital.

The fifth and final chapter of Book I describes the “essential achievement” of the revolution. Here, Tocqueville points to the problématique, especially the solution the revolution proffered to France, Europe, indeed the world. As both “a social and political revolution,” its initial anarchy masked increased state power, a continuation of the Old Regime’s statist centralism not a rupture with it. The revolution did entail changes in “ideas, sentiments, habits, and mores,” turning them even further against from aristocratic civil society and feudal political institutions. Democracy in France revealed itself suddenly and dramatically, not piece-by-piece, as in England. In explaining why this was so, Tocqueville turns to the substantive, analytical portions of his study, beginning in Book II. 

This leaves his reader with the task of working through his analysis of the causes of the revolution that began in France. In a letter to his friend M. de Corcelle, Tocqueville wrote, “I think that the books which have most roused men to reflection and have had the most influence upon their opinions and their actions, are those in which the author does not tell them dogmatically what they are to think, but puts them into the way of finding the truth for themselves.” This is as true for citizens as it is for philosophers. “I am convinced that the excellence of political societies does not depend upon their laws, but upon what they are prepared to become by the sentiments, principles, and opinions, the moral and intellectual qualities given by nature and education.” Tocqueville cannot change the nature of the French, the nature of human beings, or the nature of the modern man, the democrat, the man who began to take shape with the advent of Christianity. But he can contribute to the civil education of the French citizen and the modern democrat. “Without pretending to teach” in the sense of dogmatic instruction, Tocqueville would “show to him in every page what are the sentiments, opinions, and morals which lead to prosperity and freedom, and what are the vices and errors infallibly opposed to those blessings.” This is indeed “the chief, and I may say the only, object I have in view.” [1] Throughout, it is indispensable for Tocqueville’s reader to keep in mind the guidance Tocqueville provides, at the outset.

 

Note

1. Letter to M. de Corcelle, September 17, 1853, in Memoirs, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Two volumes. London: Macmillan and Company, 1861. Volume II, pp. 235-39. I am indebted to Robert Eden for drawing my attention to this letter.

Xudong Zhang: Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

 

Between the massacres at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the people of China endured what Zhang calls a “tense process of relaxation,” “a silent revolution in every domain of Chinese life as the People’s Republic transformed from a centrally planned economy to the world’s new workshop and its most coveted market for international capital.” A “boisterous, disorienting social sphere underscored by a carnivalesque consumer mass culture equipped with new information technology from the cell phone to the Internet” appeared to herald “economic prosperity, cultural diversity, institutional rationalization, and even political stability”— likely to hasten Chinese integration “into the global system,” albeit with a concurrent “deepening of social divisions and tensions in the space of the nation-state.” 

Some two decades later, we know that the Chinese Communist Party had other plans, which included a comprehensive system of surveillance, a state-controlled alternative ‘internet,’ and imperialist geopolitical extension throughout the world targeted ultimately at the United States. Zhang wants to prevent the realization some of this. He knows he may not succeed, writing, “my central observation on the 1990s is that the perceived dissolution and degeneration of the totality of a purported socialist reality opens a narrow gate on the reconfiguration of economic, social political, and cultural powers in a moment of danger.”  A ‘postmodernist’ scholar tutored by the lit-crit scholar Fredric Jameson, he would advance some sort of socialism under the usual rubric of ‘cultural’ neo-Marxism. Hobbled by the cumbersome clogs of ‘postmodernist’ jargon, his book stands as a forlorn of embodiment of a dream opposed by a disciplined oligarchic regime that knows what it wants to do and steadily goes about doing it. If ever there was a narrow gate for such a thing to limp through, China’s rulers have closed it firmly. This notwithstanding, Zhang does know a lot about China, and one can learn from him. 

China in the 1980s, he writes, featured “the unfreedom of the total state” in China. But this “total” (dare one say ‘tyrannical’?) regime preserved two kinds of freedom. It “maintained a tightly woven collective life” of “mutual dependency, whose internal socioeconomic equality and political-ideological homogeneity ensured initiative and possibilities available only in a ‘mass democracy’ or an ‘enlightened despotism.'” I think that means a centralized state controlled by an oligarchy kept ‘the ruled’ down, but not atomized; the ruled helped one another. “Second, the state and its socialist infrastructure acted both as a mediator with and a buffer against the capitalist world market, thus effectively protecting a fledgling national market of economic and cultural production/consumption.” 

By the 1990s, “the sweeping marketization in anticipation of China’s full entry into the capitalist global economy seems to have strengthened the Chinese economy and in particular benefited the new ruling elite of a bureaucratic capitalism.” But China’s new middle class, non-ideological and pragmatic, did not act in the manner of Western liberals, esteeming individual freedom. It sought the “deterriorialized” world of “postmodernity,” by which Zhang means (among other things) “globalization.” How then does ‘postmodernism’ correlate with ‘postsocialism’? How do global capitalism and “the revolutionary and socialist legacies of Mao’s China” interact? Zhang takes the side of ‘postsocialism’ in this confrontation, asking his readers to think about, “how it can address the complexity of Chinese reality, above all the fascination with/resistance to the capitalist commodity economy and the attachment to/forgetfulness of the revolutionary and socialist experience.” He wants to avoid any recurrence to the “Hegelian/Marxist” rationalism, which purported to describe a linear (if dialectical) historical progress toward what Zhang calls “a forever postponed and forever abstract Messianic world revolution.” A bit like a left-wing version of President Donald Trump, he insists on the need for national sovereignty. Unlike Trump, however, he hopes that this nationalism will remain socialist in a regime “whose semiautonomy (or semidependency on a larger totality) is a crucial, indispensable condition of the possibility for systematic opposition and resistance” to the “capitalist global economy.” He wishes this sovereignty could be “endowed” by “the community of the people.” He imagines that this is possible if one takes on the ‘postmodernist’ project, eschewing “abstract and essentialized cultural truth-claims” (e.g., ‘all men are created equal’) and embracing “individual and communal perceptions and experience of the epochal material-technological determinations by capitalism as a natural-historical setting and not an ontological self-understanding of human beings”—”an emergent culture or form of life.” “Life” is indeed the criterion here, as it is with ‘postmodernists’ generally, who have taken Nietzsche’s aristocratic vitalism and made it egalitarian. Post-socialism rightly understood “transcends the dogmas of capitalism and socialism to get in touch with the productive forces of the world of life with all its social and cultural specificities and complexities.” 

Zhang divides his book into three parts. The first part describes and comments on (‘critiques,’ as ‘postmodernists’ like to say) “the convoluted intellectual discussion during the 1990s, with Beijing as the epicenter.” Here Zhang “confront[s] central contradictions or conflicts around which the major battles of intellectual and cultural-political engagements of the Chinese 1990s played out.” These contradictions included that between “neoliberal forces of market fundamentalism” and “the socialist state”; “the global postmodern turn” and “Chinese political and cultural subjectivity”; and “democracy” in the sense of a “mass society” based on a market economy and “Chinese intellectual discourses and institutions.” Overall, these contradictions embodied both the conflict between, and the intertwining of, nationalist and socialist ideas. 

In the second part of the book Zhang addresses these matters in terms of “literary representations of the new global space anchored or embedded in the particular narrative discourse of modern Chinese ‘subjectivity’—as identity, selfhood, interiority, and self-image (or rather self-imaging).” In these representations Zhang finds the “melancholy of the urban middle class detached from its personal and collective identity defined historically in the project of Chinese revolution and socialism.” The book’s third part “analyzes different ways of formulating the national situation and national self-identity in the truly international space: art film.” 

In the 1990s, “the only thing the Chinese government does not readily take from the U.S. model is it political structure.” The regime wanted economic development, “turn[ing] to authoritarian capitalist societies in East Asia—Singapore, South Korea, and, until very recently, Taiwan—for political inspiration.” The regime’s “cynical pragmatism and opportunism” served as “the sole source of its legitimacy,” a “legalistic, administrative, and technocratic blanket” with which it attempted to muffle “the public articulation of the political vision of an actually existing but internally differentiating socialism.” It hadn’t fully succeeded. “The oppressiveness of the Chinese state in some areas is paralleled by unprecedented freedom and anarchism in other parts of the social domain.” But not for long, the rulers hoped. “Under the cover of Marxist philosophy, the Chinese state, rooted in a Leninist party organization, becomes a ruthless promoter of capitalist-style development, and of the market revolution as it has prevailed in the Western world since the Reagan-Thatcher era,” a “giant interest group” in its own right: “a CCP Inc.” The self-interest, the “unchecked power and corruption” of this oligarchy “puts it in direct confrontation with the society at large,” “pos[ing] a direct threat to the economic growth and social stability that the state depends on so desperately for its own political survival.” The “rising proto-middle class demand[s] more clarity and rationality in terms of rights and positive law,” but the “state bureaucracy” wants to such things. 

Economic growth armed with political power “creates astounding disparities in distribution of wealth, ranking China today among the most unequal nations in the world”—”worse than the United States,” Zhang shudders, rivaling such oligarchies as Russia and Indonesia. “All this has been done not through the demise of a strong central government, but under the close watch and constant guidance of a socialist regime” via “rent-seeking, insider trading, or stealing of public property,” activities made easier by “the lack of press freedom” to expose them. “The rapid erosion of the basic rights of the working people established under Chinese socialism makes them powerless vis-à-vis capital and the new managerial class.” In view of the fact that the (supposedly secured) basic rights of the working people did not prevent the deliberate extinction by famine of millions of Chinese peasants under Mao, it’s hard to read that last locution with a straight or even a somewhat composed face, but Zhang prefers not to think that state socialism aiming at social equality may ‘need’ to kill a lot of people to get there, only to lead the killers to corruption and enrichissesez-vous-ing after the bloodbath is over. Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising to learn that in China “private enterprise… lacks the legal protection it enjoys in the West.” Money-making is for the oligarchs, not the ruled. “Eighty percent of national private savings is in the hands of a tiny nouveau riche class,” while “China’s rural inhabitants—still more than seventy percent of the population—are left to fend for themselves.” That is a bit better than being slaughtered by Maoist ideologues, but Zhang has more immediate issues to consider.

In the 1980s it still had been possible to think that Chinese intellectuals and the bureaucratic state were “natural, inseparable partners in herding the people through social change while maintaining order,” that “intellectuals are the moral conscience of the people and have the ability and right to speak for the people’s desires and longings,” and that the Chinese people want “modernity, understood as a set of unquestionable universal institutions and values.” Tiananmen Square exposed both the “parasitic and symbiotic relations” between intellectuals and the state. The modernizing adaptation of the ancient Confucian model of the wise emperor and his learned administrators, benevolently setting the moral tone for the Chinese people—an adaptation which oscillated between aspirations for “Western-style democracy” and “enlightened despotism” in China—proved illusory. The oligarchy didn’t even recognize those aspirations, “crush[ing] the popular protest as a threat to ‘stability,’ not as a crusade against neoliberalism” with all “the ruthlessness of a rising technocratic regime.” 

Regrouping after this debacle ‘Nineties neoliberals redefined themselves. They shared the “neoauthoritarian legacy” of the ‘Eighties neoliberalism—by which Zhang means that both versions “profoundly distrust[ed] social democracy (particularly mass democracy) while searching for an efficient and radical way to establish a new socio-ideological order based on the market and private ownership.” However, the earlier neoliberals were reformers “within the movement of Chinese socialism” in the sense that they concerned themselves “with political democratization and maintaining a socially just distribution of wealth”; ‘Nineties neoliberals “not only openly challenge[d] the very existence of Chines socialism but also [took] issue with the notion of the Western welfare state from an orthodox neoliberal standpoint.” As part of “a massive deintellectualization of Chinese cultural life in the 1990s,” Chinese neoliberals turned away from Marxism and ‘postmodernism’ toward exegesis, positivism, and empiricism, evidently hoping to pass through the ideological filters of the oligarchic regime. (“State censorship plays a role in shaping the coded language of intellectual debate, of course.”) Indeed, “the post-Mao Chinese ‘public sphere’ is a sham whose only existence and festivities are in and of the ideology and fantasy,” something one might say of the Maoist Chinese ‘public sphere’ as well, although Zhang is too discreet to suggest it. Chinese neoliberals were thinking about “how to secure the freedom of a few”—themselves—against “the demands for equality by the many.” “The Chinese government’s behavior in 1989 was more effective in cracking down on the democratic initiative for economic equity, social justice, and political participation by the working people than in weeding out ‘bourgeois liberalism,’ which surged back into the domestic mainstream in the form of neoliberal economics, and into the global context with the rhetoric of freedom and rights.”

Zhang maintains that the voices against neoliberalism belonged broadly to what was called China’s “New Left.” One part of the New Left stance was nationalism, triggered by the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, precipitated by Chinese missile tests near the coast of Taiwan. When the United States responded by deploying two aircraft carrier battle groups outside the Strait, many intellectuals recalled the history of Western imperialism in China from the 1840 Opium War to the 1945 Japanese surrender. “Human rights rhetoric… came to be viewed cynically in China as cover for political or geopolitical concerns,” part of the “clash of civilizations” discussed by Samuel Huntington in his widely-read contemporaneous book. This view was confirmed in 1999 during the Kosovo War, when U.S. cruise missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; the Chinese rejected the American explanation that the attack was an error based on the use of old maps, taking the incident as an “exercise of raw power out of sheer self-interest by an integrated West led by the United States,” although Zhang leaves the definition of the supposed self-interest in destroying a Chinese embassy undefined.

With this renewed nationalism came a critique of neoliberalism provoked by the failure of capitalist ‘shock therapy’ in Russia. “The Russian path became a living reminder of the road China must not go down.” The New Left thus presents a renewal of national socialism, long discredited for its linkage to Nazism.

Zhang doesn’t put it that way. “The central debate” in 1990s China was “about how to engage in the process of social modernization in a relatively efficient and just way, or, to be blunt, how to avoid a major human disaster while embarking on this journey.” Zhang condemns the neoliberal side of the debate as “not so much a pursuit of freedom but a wishful and egoistic attempt to carve out a self-enclosed, indeed barricaded bourgeois haven out of an unstable reality of irreducibly uneven development.” Meanwhile, nationalism “takes shape on an after-image of the vanishing medium that is the traditional nation-state,” now seriously compromised by globalization. Zhang doesn’t mind nationalism at all, however, so long as it “makes itself available to a populist and even socialist vision of a sound national economy combined with a sound national politics”; “it is the socialist potential of this nationalist discourse that [kept] it as a meaningful position in the Chinese intellectual field in the 1990s.” As a ‘postmodern,’ Zhang would attempt to “de-colonize and de-essentialize the mind from Western metaphysics in general and from the predominant Western discourses of modernity in particular,” while retaining the “Marxist critique of the capitalist colonial system and its internal hierarchy,” not to mention socialism itself and “the Chinese state-form.” One might describe this set of aspirations as incoherent, but ‘postmodernism’ never claimed to esteem reason.

It soon transpires that the New Left is just as ‘internationalist’ or ‘globalist’ as neoliberals, and even more ideological, but in a different way. The Chinese New Left is “a cluster of loosely connected intellectual discourses and tendencies” owing “its existence to a truly international and historically embedded conceptual framework, theoretical arsenal, and symbolic power.” “Many of the best Chinese students became raging ‘New Leftists’ by the time they complete their much envied education at, say, Berkeley or Duke.” But no worry, it is “no longer possible or meaningful to distinguish the ‘Chinese’ from the ‘un-Chinese’ elements in the New Left, which are intimately connected to Chinese reality.” The “critical intellectuals in China today embark on a systematic and open-ended questioning of both the socialist and capitalist assumptions of modernity,” breaking “the straitjacket of socialism and capitalism as two reified and fetishized social, political, and theoretical institutions.” This seems to mean that the Chinese New Left rejects a civil society in which market relations dominate all other social relations (the straitjacket of capitalism) while affirming a civil society of communitarian mutual aid. It isn’t clear, however, in what way New Leftist differ from other socialists (except for their nationalism). They do not think the time is ripe to get rid of the state, as American and European New Leftists did in the 1960s. On the contrary, they endorse the view of Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein in their book The Cost of Rights, which argues that “all rights, including the so-called ‘negative rights,’ depend on the state and its taxation; that all rights are public goods whose protection requires the government to make socially responsible and morally satisfying choices; and that, in view of the sorry reality in ‘free’ Russia, ‘statelessness spells rightlessness.” This is of course quite consistent with the American Declaration of Independence, which affirms that governments are instituted to secure unalienable natural rights, although it is clear that neither Holmes nor Sunstein nor Chinese New Leftists regard rights as natural but rather as historical, changeable, ever-evolving. 

The Chinese New Left would oppose the “global imperial order” of the United States and its “bourgeois ideology” with a “Chinese way” of “constantly historicizing and contextualizing the particularities, arbitrariness, and intellectual closures of all these circulating universal claims while keeping the future-oriented utopian horizons of history open.” This isn’t really a Chinese way at all, but the Western ‘postmodernist’ way instantiated in China. It is indeed as utopian as ‘postmodernism’ generally, which is why ‘postmodernism’ gets play primarily within universities and other schools, sometimes with an assist from mass media companies and political parties, when they find it useful to do so. Zhang admits the universalist ambition of the New-Left Chinese way when he stipulates that “Chinese strivings must be defined in a way that speaks to other peoples in other parts of the world” by “articulat[ing] the national dilemma [of China] as a universal problematic, and vice-versa,” “transcend[ing] simultaneously the mythology of a self-contained Chinese culture and the closure of historical horizons in bourgeois civilization,” the rival universalism. In this, it should be noticed, Chinese New Leftism dovetails rather well with the geopolitics of those soulless bureaucrats in Beijing that they deplore.

The 1990s saw “a thriving, omnipresent market and a retreating, decentralized state power.” If the latter claim is true, it was very much a matter of taking one step back in order to position oneself for two steps forward, but for the time the new middle class managed to form “semiautonomous social and cultural spaces of its own,” wherein they cultivated nationalism, private property ownership, and a cosmopolitanism understood as a desire to bring China out into the world as China. Nationalist and consumerist sentiments largely replaced the “universalistic high culture of humanism and modernism” of the 1980s. The “new terrain” in Chinese society established itself “outside the institutions of the state and intellectuals.” So, for example, the 1996 collection of “crude journalistic writing” titled China Can Say No, abominated America but did so without state sponsorship (although not without state “blessing”). 

Beyond anti-Americanism, what did Chinese nationalism consist of? In the “new round of economic liberalization” undertaken in 1992, “the state itself was by far the biggest shareholder, stakeholder, and employer in an already diversified, mixed economy”; “combined with a modernizing socialist bureaucracy,” this “allowed the state to be an integral, indeed omnipresent part of the new image of the nation.” However, nationalism as understood in Chinese society differed from “the state rhetoric of patriotism.” It was more visceral. Such powerful sentiments might circle around to challenge the regime, and so were kept “tightly controlled by the government.” An oligarchic regime may foment nationalism, but it must remain alert to the risk of a nationalism that morphs into calls for popular sovereignty. The Chinese Communist Party has remained vigilant about such a prospect throughout its decades in power, and the ‘Nineties were no different. 

Zhang rightly distinguishes “this new image of the nation” from the traditional, Confucian motif of tianxia. “Literally meaning ‘under the heaven,’ tianxia stands as a pre- or protonationalist notion of an empire, civilization, and universe, and thus runs against the grain of modern nationalism as a rational ideology of individual rights and change.” Very oddly, Zhang entirely omits the longstanding rivals of Confucianism in traditional Chinese politics and culture—not only Taoism and Buddhism but (more pertinently) the set of views often called ‘Legalism’—a sort of Realpolitik discourse that emerged in the ‘Hobbesian’ Warring States period of 453-221 BC. Modern Chinese intellectuals struggled for a century “to make China great again” after its loss of power, and of ‘face,’ to modern empires. This “painstaking shift of loyalty and identity from the cultural codes of Confucianism to the modern nation-state” ranged from republicanism to the ‘authoritarianism’ of Chiang Kai-Shek to the Marxism-Leninism of Mao Zedong; the Chinese oligarchy of the ‘Nineties had no taste for such variety of opinion in the civil society it oversaw. What would China’s “quiet yet aggressive new nationalism” become, be allowed to become?

Zhang shares its anti-Americanism. “In today’s international community, the United States is probably the only nation to believe that, or act as if, it has the right and moral obligation to impose its standards on other nations while at the same time fiercely promoting its own national interest, often under the same banner of American exceptionalism and supremacy,” he sniffs. He is sufficiently honest to admit that “the tension between universal principles and national boundaries is by no means unique to liberalism,” the Marxism-Leninism promoted in Mao’s widely distributed ‘Little Red Book’ being a conspicuous instance thereof. The departure from Maoism begun in 1979 and continued throughout the ‘Eighties, a departure based on pragmatism and the desire for economic development, appeals to Zhang for its non-universalist character, but worries him because the bureaucracy which implemented it opposes “any attempt to redeem or appropriate the Maoist notion of mass democracy and participation.” Zhang’s ‘postmodernist,’ pick-and-choose Maoism—a neo-Maoism pretending that Marxism tolerates popular sovereignty as a sound feature of state socialism—wants “the emergent discourse on Chinese nationalism and mass culture” to “achieve its ultimate historical and political meaning,” a somewhat vague prospect which he quite sensibly fears the oligarchs may block. 

Here is where intellectuals like, well, Zhang himself come in. “Without the full participation of its attendant ‘high culture,’ the newly emerging social experience is hampered by a lack of cultural vision, ideological articulation, and political legitimacy; instead, it is forced into a probational state of namelessness and wordlessness, even though it is clearly the field in which the dazzling vocabulary of historical change reaches or, better still creates a mode of language and representation.” This is nothing less, or more, than a new vanguardism, albeit one animated by ‘postmodernism’ instead of ‘scientific socialism.’ With the cleverly-designed tools of ‘deconstructionism’ in hand, ‘postmodern’ intellectuals like Zhang intend to guide the masses not by dictatorship according to the ‘iron laws of History’ but by rhetoric according to the great unquestioned universalist assumption of our contemporary ‘postmodernists’: egalitarianism or ‘democracy’ camouflaged by the rigorously anti-universalist valorization of “locality, difference, relativism, and a ‘deconstructive’ mode of thinking.” Such intellectuals can pummel pro-capitalist, ‘neoliberal’ intellectuals as universalizing, aristocratic pawns of the bureaucratic state, paying “only sporadic lip service” to civil rights in their striving for “a new authoritarianism.” Given the tendency of ‘authoritarian’ capitalist regimes in some other countries to ‘liberalize’ the political sphere as well, bringing in the regimes of commercial republicanism ‘postmodernists’ detest, such a pummeling is de rigeur.  

By the 1990s, the Chinese state had begun “neutraliz[ing] the moral appeal of liberal thinking by buying off the population, above all, the technocratic-managerial class,” aiming “to win back popular support” in the wake of Tiananmen “with rapid economic growth.” On the coercive side of the equation, “tighter state control of ideology forced liberal intellectuals into a state of perpetual, although silent, dissent.” The Communist Party’s state “took the lead in an all-out embrace of the market and global capital,” suspending “the commitment to the people as a whole, and to the historical experiment to create a new kind of democracy, freedom, and equality that supersedes the bourgeois model.” “As long as the tensions or disagreements” between state and society “remain manageable,” the two spheres could “pursue and formulate their interests and ideologies separately.” But “what risked being lost” was “a collective passion for political and cultural democracy.” In the years since Zhang has published his book, the regime has ‘managed’ dissent with fair success and with little interest in indulging any collective passion for democracy, if such exists. “Throughout the 1990s… the People’s Republic was swiftly mutating into but another nation-state defined by not the twentieth but the nineteenth century, and this tendency was consolidated both by the internal rationalization of the state and with the blessing of a homogenizing global ideology that presides over the withering of meaningful political life everywhere.” Post-socialist or not, modernity’s most recent turn has led not to the withering away of the state but the withering away of politics, suffocated by the knee of administrative (that is to say, oligarchic) states which tolerate capitalism insofar as it provides them with revenue and, in the West, tolerates ‘postmodernism’ insofar as it is congenitally incapable of exercising anything resembling rule in the real world.

Zhang exemplifies the latter mentality, hoping that somehow Chinese nationalism might turn democratic. He distinguishes “postmodernism in China”—the “global discourse of postmodernism and postmodernity, which entered China via the intellectuals who seek theoretical inspiration from, and discursive synchronization with, the West, and which is largely limited to small circles of literary and art criticism”—from “Chinese postmodernism”—which “pertains to Chinese everyday life as a producer of a culture of the postmodern,” in opposition to “economic, bureaucratic, and social rationalization.” As mentioned, Zhang numbers among those intellectuals who are eager to describe and define that democratic “everyday life,” maybe not so much on its own terms but on the terms of the “global discourse of postmodernism and postmodernity.” He divides his discussion into “four steps”: the “stylistic features of Chinese postmodernism”; the shift from modernism to postmodernism; the “political stakes” involved in the debates resulting from that shift; and the achievement of “a historical understanding of Chinese postmodernism as the cultural logic of a postsocialist society.” Notice that ‘postmodern’ historicism adds to the Marxist dialectical logic of socioeconomic class conflict a “cultural logic” that emphasizes art criticism of a certain kind as a supplement to, even a partial displacement of, the social ‘sciences.’ How logical will “cultural logic” turn out to be?

Regarding the “style” of Chinese postmodernism, Zhang nods to his teacher, Fredric Jameson, who links postmodernism to “consumer society.” Jameson is well known in American lit-crit circles for his attempt to understand literature as a means of encoding political and social commands and demands; in this, he led the charge in American New Left discourse as it held up ‘the young Marx’—the more Hegelian/’idealistic’ Marx—against the mature Marx who propounded ‘scientific socialism’ and spawned what was, by the 1960s, the ‘old’ Left lumbering toward its international extinction in the next generation. “Postmodernism is seen by its Chinese students as primarily a sociohistorical change articulated culturally.” That is, the cultural “logic” the course of social events, although that course may not be described fully by Marxian dialectic, which would give the enterprise a bit more rationalism than ‘postmoderns’ like. Be this as it may, in China ‘postmodernity’ features the undermining of high modernism by mass culture and the nation’s “rapid economic growth, its decidedly mixed modes of production, and its incomplete but intensifying integration into the global capitalist market.” The situation is complex, not only because socialism and capitalism have renewed their rivalry in post-Mao China but because “truly ‘premodern’ elements in Chinese society” haven’t gone away: “poverty, ignorance, superstition, chaos, repression, and the backlash of the ultraconservative” (by which Zhang means Confucianism). “To see how China receives postmodernism one has to show how China produces it”; Chinese postmodernity is “an admittedly unfinished project but one whose legitimacy, validity, and universal claims have already, for better or for worse, come under fire.” 

As in Europe and America, where the “high modernism of James Joyce, Le Corbusier, Vassily Kandinsky, etc.” was challenged by the cultural-political revolution typified by ‘May ’68’ in France, ‘Nineties China saw a similar ‘democratization’ or vulgarization, sometimes by “a journalistic genre designed for quick media exposure and consumer gratification,” sometimes by an attempt to establish a Western-style academia, complete with scholarly production and regularized promotion. Zhang argues that since ‘history’ (conceived as the course of events) accelerates with democratization, shifting with popular sentiments, an analytical approach emphasizing quick construction of cultural products and their equally quick critical deconstruction will track the permutations of Chinese society better than more traditional scholarly practices, such as ‘comparative literature,’ which requires stable bodies of work to compare and contrast with one another. At least as pertinently for his purposes, ‘postmodernism’ “may carry a revolutionary message in an era when October-style revolutions”—efforts of the ‘old’ Left—now “seem all but impossible and undesirable,” given the massive power of the oligarchic surveillance state. ‘Postmodernism’ and it alone “points to a horizon beyond socialism as we know it.” Before the Maoist regime was founded in 1949, “revolution, socialism, and mass democracy” served as the Marxist “negation of the bourgeois project of industrialization and nation building”; Deng’s “New Era” pragmatism was “a negation of the Maoist paradigm by means of Weberian rationalization,” leading “logically to a market economy under the supervision of the bureaucratic state.” Chinese postmodernism now aspires to be the negation of the negation, as Marxists like to say, thanks to the wedding of the ‘young Marx’ to a democratized Nietzscheism. It “historicizes the ideological and simplistic opposition between socialist modernity and its bourgeois or counterrevolutionary alternative” by ‘deconstructing’—”reveal[ing] and destabiliz[ing]”—the “ideological assumptions embedded in the premodern-modern order around which the foundational discourse of modern China evolves.” This, Zhang hopes, will “break the Eurocentric grip on the notion of the modern, which makes it possible for non-Europeans to imagine a native or modern in which one feels both contemporary and at home,” protected from the “ruthless force of global standardization” and defending a worldwide (but not universalistic) pluralism. It is of course a question whether relativism holds up against ‘local’ cultures such as those seen in Muslim countries or indeed in China, neither of which seems any less expansionist in ambition than the United States of today or the Europe of yesterday. ‘Clash of civilizations,’ indeed. Zhang wants ‘postmodernism’ to subvert globalism, the clash of civilizations it engenders, and the contemporary Chinese statism which purports to face off against globalism and foreign civilizations. Waxing eloquent, he avers, “One could argue that it is only amid the postmodern, postsocialist ruins or prosperity (depending on one’s perspective) that Mao’s China obtains its afterlife as an epic monument, an empire with all its sublime grandeur.”

This suggests that what Zhang calls the “political stakes” entailed in the struggle of Chinese postmodernism might be substantial. Chinese post-modernism “can only be experienced and measured against the established, dominant institutions” of the Chinese regime. Like modernism, postmodernism consists of “an endless and sometimes self-defeating struggle to become and remain the ever new”; like modernism, “postmodernism encompasses radically different social ideals and political ideologies”; “unlike modernism, however, postmodernism does not see everything as cosmologically, heroically new; rather, its concept of newness or creation hinges on a sophisticated, almost cynical sense that all good and evil, in their most extreme forms, have been somewhere, somehow, and sometimes before, tried, and what is left for contemporary men and women is nothing more than shrewd and occasionally breathtaking eclecticism, synthesis, reproduction, and representation.” Postmodernism takes ‘history’ to be “fundamentally cyclical,” not progressive. Zhang suspects that even if ‘postmodern’ egalitarians prevail in China against “the Old Left and the New Right” (the latter being the neoliberals), “new power elites in new national and international class reconfigurations” may result. This is a welcome touch of sobriety, although one might regret that it took the detour of ‘postmodernism’ to arrive at it. 

One might regret this because it’s obvious that ‘postmodernism’ will prove a feeble weapon against something like the Chinese regime. The “core assumption” of ‘postmodernism’ is “that politics, ideology, human experience, and history itself no longer matter, indeed, no longer exist, an assumption which underscores the rise of a variety of postmodern cultural identity (of ethnic or sexual varieties), or academic politics, often in the void of classically political categories such as class and nation.” Not surprisingly, Chinese nationalism “attacks postmodernism as a discourse of phantasmagoria,” while ‘postmodernists’ attempt to undermine the regime with the denial that realist epistemology has validity. An epistemological realist will refute these latter-day Berkeleys in much the same way as Dr. Johnson did, although in this case the stone they kick may be aimed at the shins of ‘postmodernists.’ Deconstruct that.

Zhang contends that Chinese postsocialism and Chinese postmodernism go together. A ‘money’ economy enhances ‘postmodernity’ because “money is a great equalizer which unifies an uneven socio-economic terrain.” When the new economy collides and entwines with China’s “residual socialism” it “keep[s] Chinese society in a permanent state of economic mobilization and ideological agitation,” with the “frustrations, fears, resentments” of “the rising consumer masses,” their “newly achieved freedoms and sense of power, their obsessions with the here and now, as well as their need for a new collective identity and social ideal” all percolating amidst “a dazzling variety of modes of production, social structures, political lexicons, ideological courses, and value systems.” This should provide “conditions of possibility for Chinese postmodernism,” he hopes, by suggesting that socialism can be “understood as an ongoing historical experiment” rather than a fixed concept in support of a fixed institutional system. Zhang cites the Chinese scholar Cui Zhiyuan’s “call for ‘intellectual liberation’ and critique of ‘institutional fetishism'” as way forward toward the construction of “a collective, cooperative model of economic development” with special emphasis on the much-neglected and indeed much-abused rural population. Zhiyuan envisions an economics and a politics of fluidity instead of institutionalism, a sort of historicist Heracliteanism. This, Zhang bravely insists, comports with “the Chinese economy and everyday life” of today, which “have already outgrown the bureaucratic control and ideological tutelage of the Reform regime, whose popular support if not political legitimacy was damaged by the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989.” What is needed is “a new theory for a new social system, a new democracy, and a new cultural-intellectual program.” Zhang deplores any “rigid understanding of Maoism as a utopian totalitarianism,” insisting that it too can be deployed ‘postmodernly,’ as in its simultaneous legitimation and distortion “during the commercial Mao craze of the early 1990s,” wherein Mao’s image became a popular imprint on merchandise. The real Mao was a mass-murdering tyrant, but the magic wand of postmodernism can deconstruct and reconstruct him as the fairy godfather of a future Chinese democracy.

Good luck with that.

Given his ‘postmodernist’ predilections, it makes sense that Zhang turns away from politics (recall that it no longer exists) to contemporary Chinese literature and film. He begins with the fiction of Wang Anyi, who sets her plots in Shanghai. Prior to World War II, Shanghai was China’s most cosmopolitan city, ‘the Paris of Asia,’ “the epitome of Chinese urban modernity.” Since then, the Maoist revolution has come and gone, and in Wang’s account the city now “threaten[s] to outsmart and outlive its peasant conquerors and the brutal system they imposed on it.” She nonetheless retains the Marxist framework of “class analysis,” as “Shanghai residents remain deeply embedded in consumerism and nostalgia for a consumer’s life-world despite Shanghai’s metamorphosis from a city of urban middle-class consumers to one of producers and from a cultural to a political center.” Shanghai’s “anticollective, apolitical” sensibility can find no resources in a pre-modern past, having “no significant past or memory prior to its founding as a treaty port, an event marking the global expansion of capitalism and colonialism in the nineteenth century.” Shanghai residents have long associated “the rest of the country with darkness, backwardness, and chaos,” even as residents of the rest of the country think of Shanghai as the place where the mercantile “foreign devils” were allowed well-contained access to China. Pre-Mao, the city regime “was made and reinforced by a self-governing, self-regulating city council that consisted of wealthy, predominantly foreign taxpayers who took full advantage of the power vacuum of the semicolon and wasted no time in creating a petit État dans l’État.” The regime and those it governed thought of Shanghai “as a dynamic vanguard of history, an island of civilization, and the ultimate embodiment of the true present of modernity,” set “to forcibly yank China… out of the vicious cycle of tradition.” The Maoist defined the vanguard of history rather differently; they won, but not simply and not permanently. 

Zhang takes Wang’s fiction itself as a sort of vanguard. In her “allegories of Shanghai one will not find any utopian gesture of redemption”—as one finds in partisans of capitalism and communism alike—and “not even a guarded optimism for a rising everyday sphere in a China that may be well on its way to creating a new urban and political culture precisely by incorporating a reinvented past into the undefined present.” Firmly anti-utopian, she holds herself open to the way in which the present may define itself in the future, so long as China resists the too-rigid over-defining ideologies of the past, and their sometimes brutal practices. ‘Postmodern,’ indeed. In his discussion of Shanghai’s ‘minor literature’ of the ‘Nineties, Zhang leans heavily on such ‘postmodernists’ as Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, claiming that “Shanghai may be a privileged site to witness the central dilemma of modernity,” defined by those writers as “a historical process which enlightens by mythologizing,” sweeping aside previous mythologies while producing its own “intricate network of signs, images, and narratives.” Modernity contradicts itself, not merely in the dialectics of class struggle, as Marxists say, but in language, symbols, sentiments. Modernity’s constant change, seen in Shanghai, frustrates hierarchies: “None is exhausted or ready to settle, which hints at the beginning of a long existence whose meaning must be read against and redeemed from all the chaos and meaninglessness of the now.” 

What might that meaning be? Zhang turns to ‘Nineties filmmakers for suggestions. He selects several that “share the postrevolutionary assumption and seek to deconstruct the ‘grand narrative’ of social revolution and idealism by constructing a counternarrative of national trauma and traumatized individual life.” As not only post-revolutionary but post-Tiananmen films, films made after the regime halted its apparent liberalization of the ‘Eighties stopped, they also register “the end of the so-called New Era and all its popular and intellectual euphoria about modernity, progress, and subjectivity.” The regime’s crackdown on dissent “was viewed by liberals inside and outside China as moving against the global wind of change which completed the destruction of the Soviet Empire”; therefore, “the Chinese situation was and must be viewed as a shocking and painful anomaly,” as Chinese liberals went down to “disastrous defeat” and attempted to recover through “renewed association with international ideological and symbolic orders.” 

For their part, filmmakers sought “an authentic experience of time and history, an ontological meaning of existence amid change (or no change).” But “as long as the Chinese government is constantly on guard against ‘peaceful evolution’—a code word for subverting the socialist system in China through internal mutation—’liberal intellectuals’ in China remain prime suspects of a ‘fifth column’ in the eyes of an ideologically besieged state.” The regime “now grounds its legitimacy solely and defensively on economic growth, social rationalization, and its own monopolistic role in order maintenance”—in sum, “growth without democracy” or “market socialism,” a strategy which Zhang supposes has been “forced” upon the regime because it is “compet[ing] with international capitalism on the latter’s terrain.” In the ‘Nineties, “the socialist state [took] the lead in a massive integration with global capitalism,” he writes, although a generation later it has become obvious that “integration” was the beginning of a play for dominance. But Zhang could see that “the twin forces of commodification and state intervention [were] closing up a real or imagined public sphere which once existed for the liberal intellectuals of the New Era,” who turned to “neo-Sinology and neo-Confucianism” in “an eternal Quixotic battle against totalitarian repression.” 

Zhang prefers the filmmakers’ strategy, which comports with his ‘postmodernist’ sensibilities. In Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, three episodes in the film correspond to moments of recent Chinese history: Mao’s 1957 purge of intellectuals; the “Natural Disaster, code word for the massive famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward,” the Second Five Year Plan imposed by the Maoist regime between 1958 and 1962; and the Cultural Revolution of the late ‘Sixties. Tian presents each of these events “in a way irreconcilable with orthodox historiography,” deconstruction “the myth of national history” by “accounting for the traumatic experience of innocent individuals.” Titling his three episodes “Father,” “Uncle,” and “Stepfather,” Tian hopes to overcome “the oppressive nature of fatherhood”—under Chairman Mao it was Saturnine—with “the youthful power authorized by a higher authority, namely the Father or the Name of the Father, which solely determines the meaning of history.” But despite the presence of this Father of fathers, what makes The Blue Kite a compelling film is the fact that it offers no ready catharsis, no instant relief, no psychological drama or cultural exoticism which channels shock to its articulation in the world of commodities.” In this, Tian captures the way in which Chinese postmodernism reversed the teaching of Maoist Marxism by using a Maoist-Marxist technique. He shows the contrast between the old and the new, as the Maoists did, but “for opposite ideological and political effects.” “In reading the cinematic rewriting of the national history of modern China, we can argue that the trauma of modern China is not so much the ennui of history, nor even the melancholy of revolution and modernity, but, rather, the anxiety that history has not yet truly begun,” that the true intentions of the true Father have yet to be revealed. Although Zhang doesn’t mention it, one should notice that many Chinese of the next generation would establish underground Christian churches consisting of persons who hold that the true Father has indeed revealed Himself. Whether Tian may share this conviction is impossible to say; he does show why it might find ready listeners in contemporary China.

Zhang devotes his main interpretive energies to The Story of Qiu Ju by the well-known filmmaker Zhang Yimou. This film, and Zhang Yimou’s films generally, demand to be ‘read’ on their own terms, resisting ‘deconstruction.’ Xudong Zhang nonetheless determines to soldier on, intending to interpret the film in accordance with the (‘postmodernist’) “logic of historical analysis.” He will make The Story of Qiu Ju a reflection of “the emergent mainstream ideology of the everyday world framed by Chinese society’s massive transition into the market system guided by an authoritarian party-state.” “It is precisely the fantastic absolutism, demonstrated in both the planners of socialist modernity and the visionaries of global capitalist homogeneity, that is cast in doubt by Zhang Yimou’s films about the commoners in the postsocialist Chinese everyday world.”

As in The Blue Kite, in The Story of Qiu Ju the filmmaker insists that there is something more than the existing Chinese regime and its ‘laws’ (such as they are). There is “something prior to” these laws, to any laws, and even to the regime, to any regime. Qiu Ju is a young woman seeking justice in the broader sense, and the film narrates “the comic ways by which a simple-minded peasant woman” persistently misunderstands the Chinese legal system, “missing its point in the same way as she keeps getting lost in the modern big city.” 

“The keywords in the film are ‘justice’ and ‘apology,’ two things Qiu Ju is so determined to obtain and around which the film narrative unfolds.” The two English words translate the same Chinese word, shuofa. “Shuofa means the way things are discussed, talked about, and eventually, understood and accepted without coercion”—more, “the way things are must be accepted by those to whom it is explained; the politicolegal order must rest on a tacit agreement,” on what Americans would call the consent of the governed, reasonable assent. But Qiu Ju doesn’t seek justice in the American or Western sense, either; she seeks not “an abstract general law” that applies “to all equally and indifferently,” but for a way to make sense of things, a way of “ensur[ing] the coherence and integrity of the world of meaning and value, of understanding and, indeed of being. She is there not so much to litigate as to heal, above all her own peace of mind.” Her husband had gotten into a fight with the village chief over the hazy property rights that prevail in rural China, “a gray area between the government and the written law, on one hand, and peasant culture, everyday practice, and the plebian sense of right and wrong” that persists despite the Communist regime’s assiduous efforts to erase it. The dispute had escalated into a (mis)perceived challenge to the reputation, the ‘face,’ of the chief, who kicked Qiu Ju and (it eventually transpires) broke one of his ribs. Despite being in the third trimester of pregnancy, Qiu Ju embarks on her quest.

The film thus “runs against the grain of the notion of ‘rule of law’ introduced by the modernizing state for its political legitimacy, but whose philosophical justification lies historically in the bourgeois pursuit of indifferent abstract generality,” a “generality based on exchange-value and the universal individual as the social figure of property rights.” It equally challenges the regime that has been flirting with such a conception of rights. As Qiu Ju stubbornly works her way up the legal-administrative Chinese food chain, she exhibits something like “a peasant’s belief in the good and benevolent emperor,” to whom she feels entitled to appeal, as per the practice of classical imperial China. And indeed under Mao, the “notion of mass democracy and proletarian dictatorship” hovered “above the law.” Qiu Ju “seeks the rule of law at the highest level of government, that is, the realm of the sovereign, which is, by definition outside and above the law but defines its moral-political constitution.” 

There are three reasons “why Qiu Ju’s repeated trips are doomed to fail.” “First, the peasant fails the state by not understanding its efforts to modernize its legal system, which alone protects the peasant’s rights.” That is, even insofar as the post-Maoist Chinese state really does attempt to protect property rights, the peasant whose rights it seeks to protects doesn’t understand what it’s trying to do. Second, “the state fails the peasantry by not understanding their inarticulate moral and political codes that constitute and underscore any real, substantial order.” It doesn’t know what it would take to win the consent of the peasants. Third, “Qiu Ju’s quest for justice is bound to fail because a general, indifferent, legalistic justice is not what she wants and does not solve her problem, and yet it is all that the modern rational social and state organization has to offer.” The drama of the film consists a sort of dialectical examination of shuofa. Starting “with a question regarding the law, in terms of a perceived injustice,” it moves to “a persistent demand for an explanation,” but culminates in “a commentary, a reflection on law and its limits.” “The difficulty the heroine encounters in this film is not so much the difficulty of the legal order understood as an abstract and general norm, but the value system of everyday life in contemporary China struggling with its own fundamental and political self-understanding.” 

Whereas the most obvious conflict the film portrays consists of the confrontation between “the unwritten moral-ethical codes of the peasantry tinged with the political legacy of Chinese socialism”—including “but not limited to conventional rubrics such as ‘popular habit,’ ‘social custom,’ ‘natural right,’ or ‘tradition'”—and “modern rationality” instantiated in “the bureaucratic-legalistic machinery of the modernizing state” as it “tries to show itself in abstract yet specific, impersonal, yet socially ‘responsible’ terms,” the genuine healing, “the solution in real ethical and moral senses, is attainable only within the parameters of village life.” There, neither habit nor custom nor tradition but nature prevails, as Qiu Ju goes into labor on New Year’s Eve. The village chief intervenes and gets her to the hospital, saving her life and the life of her boy. “For the village chief, that is merely the right thing to do as a fellow and elderly village,” quite apart from his dispute with Qiu Ju and her husband. In the village, conventional behavior looks to nature as its guide. In the final comic twist, as a gesture of reconciliation the family invites the chief to the traditional party celebrating the one-month anniversary of the child’s birth, but he’s nowhere to be found. Belatedly, the legal system has caught up with him, arresting and imprisoning him for a short period as punishment for his assault. Tellingly, the regime’s verdict isn’t too little, too late but too late and no longer necessary.

“The film situates its dramatic intensity squarely in the structural gap between the legal and the political,” and especially the political understood as “judgment based on a particular form of life,” justified and defended with “moral courage and assertiveness.” This “invisible and inarticulate framework is prior to the legal and the legalistic order, yet it constitutes the very foundation of the latter,” the consent of the governed based not on “justice done in legalistic terms” but “‘right-and-wrong’ in terms of ‘natural right’ rooted in the singularity (not generality) of a peasant community,” a form of right or justice that governs the peasants’ “world of everyday life and informs their moral and political behavior.”

Here is where Zhang seizes the opportunity to extract a socialist-‘postmodern’ lesson from what is quite evidently a pre-modern understanding of right. Qiu Ju “is still not happy at the end of the film”—she had reconciled with the village chief, no longer wanted him punished—but “that is not a problem” because “as long as the subject here is not a bourgeois individual but something embedded in and constituted by a collective,” the problem disappears. The right to life of the individual person, the right to the individual’s liberty, the right of the individual to his property and to pursue happiness—none of these matter in a tight-knit village community. And how could the world of the peasant village somehow overcome the impersonal power of the modern state and become the world of some post-post-socialist society? “The subversion of the Kantian notion of law and the Hegelian notion of mediation”—the philosophic preludes to Marxism and ‘progressive’ contemporary liberalism alike—may “thus open up a theoretical vista for the imagination of a revolutionary form of collectivity which unites the universal and the singular in the contemporary context of capitalist globality and its discontent”—the “possibility of the impossible.”

Or not. Zhang’s ‘postmodern’ politics does indeed recall the communitarianism of the American New Left of the ‘Sixties, when the first wave of American ‘postmodernism’ gathered the strength it took to flood the schools with its doctrines of anti-statist and utopian egalitarianism. More interesting is his recognition of the interplay between natural right (without the scare quotes) and convention. This recognition eventually led him to political philosophy as understood by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and to such commentators on that philosophy by Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. 

 

 

Vladimir Bukovsky: Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity. Alyona Kojevnikov translation. Middletown: Ninth of November Press, 2019 (1996).

 

Among the courageous dissidents who opposed the Soviet regime, the late Vladimir Bukovsky will remain among the most honorable. ‘Hospitalized’ by the Communists in the early 1960s (he had photocopied Milovan Djilas’ The New Class, a telltale act of insanity in the eyes of the comrades), he eventually earned a degree in neuropsychology in England, where he resided after his expulsion from his homeland in 1976. He was best known in the West for his campaign against the Soviet abuse of psychiatry for political purposes.

Bukovsky published the first edition of Judgment in Moscow in France in 1995; a Russian edition appeared the next year. He intended to expose the character of the Soviet regime and the geopolitical strategy which derived from that character by presenting and commenting on a substantial selection of the Kremlin documents he’d copied during the brief period when the regime’s archives were open to the public, beginning in 1991. These documents not only show the malice, duplicity, and self-delusion of Lenin’s heirs; they also show how Western politicians, journalists, and businessmen blundered repeatedly in formulating their own policies, primarily because they failed to understand the persistently Leninist mindset of their counterparts. That failure explains the long delay in publishing the English translation—its uncompromising denunciation of Mikhail Gorbachev being among its many offenses to genteel progressives in the United States and England. Revising it for this long-delayed edition, Bukovsky reports that he made no significant revisions. “Alas, my worst forecasts have come true: failure to finish off the Soviet system conclusively has led to its revival. Clearly Putin and his KGB cohorts would have never climbed to power if Russian society had the courage to launch what we advocated twenty-three years ago: a Nuremberg-style trial and lustrations. Without it, the country went full circle and reverted back to the USSR.”  

“To bring to justice those who took part in Nazi atrocities is a sacred task, the duty of one and all. But God forbid that you should so much as point a finger at a communist (let alone his fellow traveler): that is improper, a witch hunt.” And yet the Soviet Union’s crimes were no less heinous than those of Nazi Germany; the Soviets murdered many more people than the Nazis did, admittedly with a much larger population under its tyranny. Why the double standard? On a less bloody but equally insidious matter, the roil over Russian interference, real and alleged, in the 2016 U.S. elections met with cries of outrage among progressives, the same progressives who were so conspicuously silent when Moscow funneled tens of millions of dollars to Communist parties not only in the United States but around the world. Nor was there much clamor on the American Left concerning the some 40,000 paid ‘agents of influence’ the Soviets bankrolled in their countries, perhaps because so many of these were, well, American leftists, organizers of ‘peace’ movements here and in Europe. In those days, merely to mention their existence was to invite charges of ‘McCarthyism.’

Bukovsky divides his book into two main parts: “In the East” and “In the West.” He begins his account of the Soviet empire with its end, “the euphoria of 1991,” when Boris Yeltsin began his presidential term as the first post-Soviet Russian president. “A shoddy tragicomedy” ensued, “in which former second-rate party bosses and KGB generals played the part of leading democrats and saviors of the country from communism.” Having returned to Moscow for research into the Soviet archives, Bukovsky saw that “the main thing was not to allow the party a respite for recovery. It is imperative, I said again and again, to create a commission to investigate all the crimes of communism, preferably an international commission, so there could be no accusations of political bias and cover-ups.” Russians had been told “that even though the communists were guilty of crimes against their own people, of repressions and destruction of the economy, in external matters they were just like everyone else, neither better nor worse.” This was “a dangerous delusion,” in light of the activities revealed in the files Bukovsky recovered. “The Soviet Union had no ‘normal’ foreign policy, and what it called foreign policy was nothing less than decades of criminal activity against humanity,” including narcotics trafficking, bribery, blackmail, and disinformation. The KGB itself was a powerful political organization, with substantial funds in foreign banks, front organizations, and businesses abroad—resources that will enable it continue “for at least another decade even if it is closed down in Moscow.” 

This being so, the KGB archives were soon closed to the likes of Bukovsky. Only Yeltsin could have intervened effectively, but Yeltsin proved a caricature of a Russian, sunk in alcoholic distraction. He was not alone. “Nobody in our immense country, devastated by [the Cold War] was moved by a sense of duty—to history, to truth, to the memory of [the regime’s] victims.” This was the ethos of the regime, lingering in the years after its formal removal. “Born in falsehood, raised on deceit, Soviet man is firmly convinced that the world is created on the principle of a matrioshka doll: what is on the outside is just an illusion for fools, whereas what is inside, real, is completely different…. Therefore, even before you’ve opened your mouth, he is firmly convinced that you intend to cheat him, while his aim is to cheat you. What kind of a basis is this for any business?” Or any civil society at all? By 1993 the Central Committee of the Communist Party archives were shut, too, and Bukovsky had obtained all the information about the inner workings of the Soviet Union that he, or anyone else, would ever uncover for the next 25 years and counting.

The fall of the Communist regime had been predicted, first by Andrei Amalrik (Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?), by Solzhenitsyn (The Oak and the Calf), and by Bukovsky himself (To Build a Castle). Bukovsky expected it to survive about a decade longer than it did, but it would not have lasted even as long as Amalrik supposed, had the West “accepted our advice” in the 1970s “and taken the path of sharpening relations” with the regime instead of embarking on the policy of ‘détente.’ But to expect a revolution by the Russians themselves, absent outside pressure, was a chimerical hope. Bukovsky’s pessimism was well stated in a 1979 article, when he observed that “a person deprived of liberty knows nothing of his rights, and is, in any case, too debased to demand any rights at all,” living as he does among “a mass of disunited, embittered people.” The regime fell not because Soviet Man’s dead soul had revived but because the regime’s sclerosis and the West’s belated exertions of pressure beginning in the early 1980s, made it unsustainable. 

In response to that pressure the regime elevated Gorbachev to his position of undeserved prominence. His reforms—glasnost or a cautious ‘opening’ of Soviet society to the West and perestroika or a cosmetic restructuring of Soviet ruling institutions—should have been instantly recognized by anyone with even passing acquaintance with the history of the regime as a replay of the policy Lenin concocted in the 1920s. Faced with the predictable ruin of the Russian economy under Marxist policy, Lenin imposed his ‘New Economic Policy,’ whereby he lured capitalist investment with token gestures toward capitalism. As soon as there was so much as a suggestion that the policy might spin out of Communist control, Stalin shut it down, with a vengeance. “Gorbachev’s ‘reforms’ were aimed at preventing, at all costs, the formation of those independent social forces that could ensure stability in the transitional period.” As Gorbachev himself explained in a March 1985 speech to his Kremlin colleagues, “our economy needs more dynamism,” and it can achieve it if we follow “the right, correct and genuine Leninist policy.” “Legalizing private property was never contemplated”; “Gorbachev’s favorite slogan, right up to his resignation was ‘give socialism a second wind.'” The problem, from the standpoint of the regime, was that it had no available Stalin to reverse course in time to prevent its collapse. The problem from the standpoint of Russia, however, was that the liberties Gorbachev permitted “had been gifted,” not won by the Russian people themselves. “What has been gifted and not earned makes it akin to something stolen: it can be taken back, accompanied by a slap on the head.” The Western fans of ‘Gorby’ at least had the excuse of having “never lived under this regime,” but that lack of experience, Bukovsky notices, hadn’t stopped the West from changing the regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan after the Second World War. Gorbachev’s shallow cunning, Russian inertia and Western ignorance caused the dissident movement itself to split, as the celebrated dissident Andrei Sakharov accepted the president’s invitation to share a podium with him in spring 1989.

At its height, under Stalin, the Soviet Union was “a conveyor belt of death, working nonstop and according to plan, just like Soviet industry in its entirety.” Death quotas were imposed as readily as work quotas, although the death quotas were more likely to be met. As Stalin followed Lenin, Khrushchev Stalin, Brezhnev Khrushchev, Andropov Brezhnev, and finally Gorbachev Andropov, the Western intelligentsia lauded each in turn as a liberalizer. Repeated disappointment never bridled their wishful thinking. Soviet rulers themselves indulged in the supreme form of wishful thinking, Marxism-Leninism, which called for heroism at one moment and humble obedience to regime commands the next. On occasion, reality broke through, as in the CCCP’s frightened response to the anti-communist Hungarian revolution in 1956: “the wave of uprisings in Eastern Europe, and especially the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was definitely connected” with the “spirit of rebellion” which “wartime heroism” of the 1940s had stoked. This “electrified the atmosphere in the Soviet Union itself,” a Politburo-commissioned study explained. From then forward, Soviet leaders—”all of them from Khrushchev to Gorbachev”—”strove only to smother this spark of hope, justifiably seeing it as a threat to their power.” Even Khrushchev was too liberal for his successors. As veteran Bolshevik Andrei Gromyko put it in a 1984 meeting of the Politburo, Khrushchev “inflicted an irreparable blow on the positive image of the Soviet Union” when he ventured to criticize Stalin in a well-publicized “Secret Speech” before a Party Congress in 1956. The spirit of dissidence continued within the country, as well; “by the 1970s the regime had practically lost the young people, and our influence on them grew by leaps and bounds.” 

From the start, the Soviet regime suffered from a fatal contradiction. Like all regimes, it needed a set of laws. To be effective, laws must be definable and stable. But the animating principle, dialectical materialism, posited endless conflict and change until ‘the end of history.’ That is, it enshrines contradiction as the engine of ‘history.’ The supposed ‘iron laws of history’ were made of anything but iron; they demanded infinite flexibility and defied codification. Under the Marxist ideology, rulers needed to rule not by law but “behind its back, as it were.” “The law transforms into a fiction, an offshoot of propaganda calculated to create an attractive image of ‘the world’s most democratic’ socialist state.” “The country was governed” not be law but “in accordance with an endless stream of departmental, state, and party instructions and resolutions,” a bubbling hash of incompatible ingredients. At times the discrepancy between the laws ‘on the books’ and regime policy could be worked by the dissidents to their advantage, as they could cite the law against the policy and demand exoneration in court. They seldom got it, but they did illustrate the illegitimacy of the regime to their fellow subjects and to the outside world—a counter-toxin to regime propaganda. Dissidents first deployed this tactic during the 1965 trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, when they demanded that their banned books be introduced as evidence in court, thus violating the ban.

Eventually, as in the celebrated case of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Politburo threw up its hands and expelled the malefactor. As Aleksei Kosygin exclaimed at one meeting, “For some years Solzhenitsyn has been attempting to take over people’s minds.” One may be excused for thinking that Comrade Kosygin somewhat lacking in a sense of irony, but this is why a handful of dissidents worried the rulers so much. “The system could survive only on the condition of the monopolistic rule of the party and the ideology over the country—above the law, logic, and common sense. The appearance of an opposition, no matter how insignificant in numbers, even one person, heralded its end.” And when dissidents were able to persuade the United States and other foreign governments to criticize violations of human rights within the Soviet empire—in accordance with a treaty the Soviets themselves had signed—the cracks in the monolith began to widen. 

Himself expelled, Bukovsky met with U.S. president Jimmy Carter in February 1977 to discuss human rights. Or, as the Soviet Union reported in its inimitable prose, “Today, President of the USA J. Carter received criminal Bukovsky… who is well known as an active opponent of the development of Soviet-American relations.” International criticisms of human rights abuses violated the principles of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which call for non-interference in the domestic affairs of any country by any foreign power. The invocation of a treaty signed some three centuries earlier by the crowned heads of then-Christian Europe by Kremlin Leninists recalls Marx’s mot about how ‘history’ repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Détente must be saved! At least, it must be saved so long as (in the words of one set of instructions distributed to Party members) the Communists’ “ideological struggle, a struggle for social and political perceptions of the world… does not cease even in a period of international détente.” Ideological struggle is one thing, but “ideological sabotage” by foreigners who support “illicit organizations” in the Soviet empire—well, we can’t have that.

Besides, critics of Marxism-Leninism, the world’s one and only scientific socialism, must be irrational, indeed mad. “The number of those declared insane in our cases… increased significantly”; diagnoses such as ‘reformist delusion’ and ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ were invented for the occasion. “We were earmarked for psychiatric repression,” and although the outcry against such practices in the West delayed full implementation of the program to build “a psychiatric gulag,” it didn’t prevent such a thing. In the Soviet Union, “The misuse of psychiatry as an instrument in political repressions was the outstanding crime against humanity in the postwar epoch.” 

Did Politburo members believe their own ideology? Bukovsky isn’t sure. While “it is undeniable that Khrushchev had a somewhat naive, genuine peasant’s belief in socialism,” what did his successors think of it? They were rather persons steeped in Marxism-Leninism, not so much followers of its “the philosophical tenets” as psychological mirrors of those tenets. In a witty reversal of Soviet psychiatry, Bukovsky suggests that “Communist ideology is definitely deeply paranoid,” attributing conspiracy to all who disagree with it. “As is habitual for dim-witted people who know little about life in the West,” Soviet communists “ascribed their own methods, intentions, and morality to their opponents, responding to imaginary ‘schemes’ with real ones, and with slander against ‘slander. Like a boxer sparring with his own shadow, they could never win.”

Because the regime’s subjects were familiar with Soviet lies, “Soviet propaganda and disinformation were much more effective in the West than in the USSR.” Typically, this propaganda would appeal to the decent impulse among Christians (and especially ‘christians’ or secularized post-Christians) to blame themselves before blaming others for the evils of the world. Worried about nuclear war, injustice, poverty, environmental destruction? Look to yourself, sinner, Soviet atheists would proclaim. More, “most Western specialists on Russia,” to whom the average citizen looked for policy guidance, “were dependent on the regime by virtue of the fact that they needed to travel to the USSR from time to time”; passports were easily denied to those who spoke out in ways the regime disapproved of. Similar techniques could be used against exiled dissidents. Bukovsky recounts Sinyavsky’s “complicated games with the KGB”; his wife engaged in the “endless squabbles” among the émigrés, taking the line that dissidents should shut up. 

The supreme exploitation of Western naiveté came near the end of the regime, when Gorbachev sold ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ not only to “the Soviet intelligentsia, which was always up for grabs,” but to “the whole world.” Anyone who took a realistic look at the Soviet regime knew “it was impossible for a liberal reformer to climb to the top of the party ladder. Such miracles do not occur. But everyone yearned for a miracle!” No need for a Hitlerite triumph of the will when you can enjoy a Gorbastic triumph of the wish. Again parodying the pseudo-psychiatric language of his persecutors, Bukovsky calls this “a kind of mass psychosis.” It was at least a foolish illusion. While “the regime still continued to kill people, suppress the opposition, harass prisoners with impunity,” the world “worried that this might harm the main hangman.” 

“These were the hardest, bitterest years of my life,” made worse by the sometimes well-intentioned liberal democrats among whom Bukovsky lived in his time of exile. He turns to the West in the second half of his book. 

As a critic of détente and an arms-control skeptic, Bukovsky rapidly found himself labeled a ‘right-winger’. And indeed, “I reject ‘moderate’ improvements of the communist system; I do not even want socialism with a human face!” And as for nuclear weapons, he tried “to explain as politely as possible that the Soviet games of ‘arms limitation’ was not worth a brass farthing, it was deceit from start to finish.” No grant money from the Ford Foundation was forthcoming. But “imagine for a moment Nelson Mandela, released as the result of a lengthy public campaign, facing this question at his first press conference: ‘How do you feel about apartheid with a human face?'” “Yet what was apartheid by comparison with communism”—apartheid, which “pos[ed] no threat to anyone outside South Africa,” did “not try to impose on anyone its version of a bright future for all of humanity,” and (it might be added) hadn’t murdered tens of millions of people. The Soviet regime did resemble South Africa’s regime in one way, however: like the rulers of the apartheid system, it exploited those it didn’t kill.

The West’s treatment of Soviet dissidents registered its generally shallow knowledge of Soviet tyranny and the ideology that inspired it. The Soviet regime was qualitatively different from the czarism it replaced, latter-day czarism having been an increasingly sclerotic ‘Holy-Alliance’ sort of thing—oppressive and incompetent, to be sure, subject to the character of whomever sat on the imperial throne, as all hereditary monarchies are. Marxism-Leninism, however, held charms for leftist ideologues in the West, especially the social democrats who honored many of its claims. Sure enough, German social democrats had been conducting negotiations with Moscow “behind the backs of their allies” in NATO since 1969. “The German social democrats knew full well that the USSR had no intention of fulfilling its obligations regarding human right, and they were not inclined to protest against this,” and in the 1980s they marched in the vanguard of the mass disarmament campaigns that nearly neutralized the Western alliance. “Not even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan [in 1979], which exercised a sobering effect on Western public opinion, had much influence on the policy of the German social democrats,” whose “main aim remained saving détente,” imagining it to be the bridge toward the ‘convergence’ of democracy and communism in the persons of persons such as themselves. “Yet as we know from the history of their relations, the Mensheviks propose, and the Bolsheviks dispose.”

This gave Moscow an opening. The Kremlin “quickly turned human rights into an instrument for subverting European socialists, by selective rewards only for those who had moved closer to ‘rapprochement’ with them.” The only ‘progressive’ thing about that was the progressive infiltration of the European socialist parties by the KGB. By the end of the 1970s, European socialists quietly discarded their demand for human rights. “From now on, détente had only one meaning—disarmament.” 

All this notwithstanding, Bukovsky reserves some of his most stinging criticisms for the United States and the American people. “I did not like America from the very first moment I found myself there. It was enough for me to see, at one of my first appearances in one of the universities in February 1977, all those eternally shining eyes, burning with enthusiasm, to realize that I would never be able to explain anything to these people.” Feeling “overqualified to live there,” Bukovsky likens the country to “an institution for mentally retarded adolescents,” a people “engaged in what their Declaration of Independence defines with the quaint expression the ‘pursuit of happiness,'” a people that never lives in the same place long enough to acquire a real culture, “moving forward in a state of permanent amnesia” in “a land of conformists, ruled by constantly arising epidemics of a feverish nature; all of a sudden, everyone starts jogging, because it is allegedly good for one’s health.” “It is hard to imagine a nation more enslaved by any craze, even the most idiotic ones, by any petty charlatans who thought it up”—”enslaved by the pursuit of happiness” in the alleged ‘land of the free,’ misinformed by a mass media that “creat[es] celebrities, blowing them up from nothing, and then just as artificially bringing them down by trumpeting a scandal—again out of nothing.” “At times it seems that Americans, unable to bear the burden of freedom, simply seek someone to enslave them.” In sum, Bukovsky is very much a European despiser of America and all he believes it embodies.

As for the American ‘intellectual’ class, it’s no better than its European counterpart, puffed up with “overweening narcissism, belief in their ‘enlightening’ mission, and the right to a privileged elite position,” albeit in the shaky ground of leftist egalitarianism. The only redeeming feature of such over-educated mindlessness is its feebleness. Communist ideology won’t “be able to conquer the USA—simply because this ideology is too complex, too conceptual, and presumes at least some knowledge of history.” (More recently, American intellectuals have overcome that problem by offering a cartoon version of American history, obviating the need for knowledge of it.) “The American elite still believes the myth of the ‘noble savage,’ the innate good nature of Man, ruined by bad institutions.” Knowing no history, they are oblivious to the failure of socialist ideas, continuing to entertain them long after they had led the nations on whom they were imposed to ruin. Hence the folly of American scientists in the 1940s who “willingly shared atomic secrets with Stalin”; hence “the ease with which Soviet intelligence was able to operate in American leftist circles.” It was “the bogey of McCarthyism, shamelessly exploited by American leftist intellectuals for a good fifty years,” that enabled them to become the establishment by making anticommunism “shameful and practically criminal.” 

“Naturally, all this did not occur without Soviet help and would not have escaped their attention.” When Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev announced at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in 1971 that “the balance of forces on the world arena has shifted to the side of socialism,” he could point toward what seemed to him the likelihood that the United States, riven by domestic conflict over the Vietnam War, student unrest, and race relations, would eventually be induced to leave Europe to Soviet domination. With access to European industry in hand, the Soviet Union would have the fulcrum with which to tip the geopolitical scales in its favor, once and for all. “The fall of the prestige of the political system of the USA,” as one Central Committee document put it in 1973, coupled with “the growing interest of capitalist business circles in establishing trade and economic relations with the Soviet Union,” would do America in, and with it the ‘bourgeois democratic’ regimes it supported. At the same time, “stringent measures were in force to prevent any Western influence on the Soviet population.” In short, Soviet policy of the 1970s presaged Chinese Communist policy in the following century, with the necessary difference that the Soviet strategy was Eurocentric at its core, Chinese policy centered on Asia.

U.S. president Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sensed America’s weakness but increased it by embracing détente, which they made the centerpiece of their policy toward the Soviet Union. Nixon later claimed that Americans had misunderstood the policy, taking it for the alternative to the Cold War, “but it was precisely Nixon and Kissinger who created that misunderstanding.” After leaving office, Nixon wrote, “Political differences, not arms, are the root causes of war, and until these are resolved, there will be enough arms for the most devastating war no matter how many arms control agreements are reached.” Bukovsky adds, “the main ‘political difference’ in this case is Marxist-Leninist ideology,” which Soviet rulers had “no intention of abandoning… in exchange for any benefits.” “America tried to buy off the Soviet aggressor,” but the Soviets were not so bourgeois. During the decade of détente, the Soviets gained an advantage in strategic nuclear weapons and aided the extension of Communist rule more than a dozen countries. “But the worst result of détente was the loss of the will to resist that afflicted the West.” As the Central Committee documents show, “the Kremlin leaders were sure that time was on their side.” 

Their weakness was their Marxism, which dismissed public opinion as epiphenomenal. The human rights campaign dissidents spearheaded began to win converts. “The French leftist intelligentsia proved to be our closest ally,” having read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In Italy, too, it was the Left that sided with the dissidents. In England and Germany, by contrast, the Right backed them, and in the United States an unusual combination of trade-union-oriented liberal democrats (most prominently Senator Henry Jackson) and reliably anti-communist conservatives (most prominently former California governor and 1976 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan) rejected détente and vindicated human rights against Marxist dialectic. None of this would have mattered politically except for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of the decade. This demonstrated that the appeasers were mistaken, that the dissidents had been right all along. Even President Carter, never a geopolitical wizard, admitted that he had “learned much more about the Soviet Union” in December 1979 than he had “over his entire life.” The path to Reagan’s election to the presidency was cleared, widened already by the economic stagnation and monetary inflation which had persisted throughout the decade. Impeded in their pursuit of happiness, disillusioned by their representatives’ assurances of peace through accommodation, Americans stood up—quite unaccountably, given Bukovksy’s acerbic description of them. It would be the English and German Left which would continue to agitate for arms control in the 1980s, although they eventually failed to make their case. It became obvious to less ideologically-charged elements in Europe that nuclear disarmament would result in Soviet domination of the continent, given the vast superiority of ‘conventional’ Soviet forces there.

“One should follow this simple rule: never be useful to the USSR or its policies.” But simplicity is never good enough for many people—”the intelligentsia in particular,” who “are extremely arrogant, egotistic animals, considering themselves smarter than anyone else in the world, and certainly smarter than their governments.” “A member of the intelligentsia cannot simply force himself to do his job without contrivances and pretensions. He cannot just teach children to read and write—not, he has to ‘raise future generations’; he cannot just prescribe pills for a patient and ease his suffering—no, he needs to concern himself with the health of all mankind. A priest, meanwhile, is convinced that God Himself has put him in the pulpit for the salvation of one and all.” None will admit “that the basic motive of his boisterous social activity is a desire for power.” 

This being said, one can only feel gratitude for the proverbial stupidity of the Poles. They proved much too ‘simplistic’ to believe in the good faith of Russian Communists or their puppets in Warsaw. “The biggest setback to the peacemakers’ campaign was the events in Poland”—the government’s ham-handed declaration of martial law in response to protests launched by, well, the proletarians, men and women evidently too stupid to understand that the Polish Communists were their wise and just defenders. How inconvenient for social democrats in other parts of the continent, as they insisted that the imagined prospect of nuclear war was a bigger crisis than the reality of tyranny. “It is hard to say which aspect of the Polish crisis had the greatest effect on the peacemakers: the threat of a Soviet invasion, which hung over Poland for almost a year and a half, the crushing of a popular movement by the army, or that movement itself, which extended to practically the entire working population of the country.” As for Kremlin strategists, “even years later, Moscow could not understand the nationwide nature of the opposition movement” in Poland. In terms of the iron laws of Marxist history, it simply made no sense. Martial law restored ‘socialist order’ in Poland, without the need for Soviet military assistance, but that only drove the opposition movement underground while preventing the West from returning to the complaisant somnolence of its preferred attitude of wishful thinking.

“By 1984 even the most thick-skinned member of the Politburo realized that the situation was hopeless,” as the Party faced strengthened resistance in the United States and Europe, along with worsening economic problems at home, problems exacerbated by corruption of “epic proportions.” Whereas most revolutions in modern, centralized states result from the formation of alternative groups within civil society, what Tocqueville calls civic associations, Russian opposition to the central state came from uncivil associations—mafia-like local chieftains who ran local commerce beyond the reach of a fragmented bureaucracy of Party apparatchiks. “This explains why in 1992 all the break-away ‘independent’ republics ended up under the rule of the local party nomenklatura.” They had already set up their own networks of influence, years earlier. The Soviet state found it “easier… to occupy a neighboring country, suppress a full-fledged national rebellion in another, or, on the contrary, incite a revolution on the other side of the globe than to supply its own people with salt.” The stated objective of the socialist state for Marxists was to guide the way to communism by rearranging social and economic institutions so radically that the inequalities of society would not merely be erased but become permanently unthinkable by transformed human beings. Quite the contrary: actual socialist rule resulted in new forms of inequality, ineradicable ‘from above’ or ‘from below.’

“The Western leftist intellectual ‘elite’ did not want to accept that the crisis of the Soviet system in the 1980s was first of all a crisis of socialism.” They dismissed the Soviet ‘experiment’ as one based on a faulty ‘model’ of socialism. “But there are no ‘models’ of socialism, there are only various scenarios for the failure of the economy,” given socialism’s core aim of redistributing wealth instead of producing it. In Russia, the regime “lasted so long simply because Russia is a fabulously rich country,” with huge mineral resources. “The laziest ruler could rule over it without a care in the world and with no crises,” as indeed many of the czars did; “it required an ‘idea’ to bring about an economic collapse,” and the Marxists provided a very effective one. Socialism “did not so much drain as bankrupt the country, causing an incredible delay in development,” whereby Russians couldn’t exploit their “own natural resources effectively.” Costly imperial ambitions only added to the self-imposed burdens. The Reagan Administration’s arms buildup triggered collapse, a collapse hastened when the U.S. struck a deal with the Saudis to reduce the price of oil, thereby reducing one of oil-rich Russia’s few reliable sources of revenue. “The Soviet Union lost more than a third of its hard currency income in one year.”

With the peaceful anti-communist revolution in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s, “the mighty Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe fell apart.” Bukovsky suspects that the revolution itself was surreptitiously backed by Moscow, which didn’t want to repeat the Polish debacle of a few years earlier. “According to the Gorbachev plan, the ‘popular revolution’ should have brought a new generation of manipulators to power in Eastern Europe, just like themselves.” But Gorbachev botched the job. Instead of some fake democrats, he got Vaclav Havel. Since no one saw Gorbachev’s fingerprints on the original scheme, Gorbachev went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize as a genial liberalizer. The same blundering led to reunification of Germany, again not on the Kremlin’s terms, and not on the terms of Western elites (including Kissinger, British Prime Minister John Major, and French president François Mitterrand), but according to the timetable of the simple-minded German common folk (acting rather like Poles) who wanted to get their country back in one piece. Across Central Europe, “what was planned as quite moderate, inter-system changes got out of control and grew into a revolution, exposing the fundamental and incompatible difference between the intentions of the leaders and the hopes of the people.” 

Back in Russia, Gorbachev intended to ‘liberalize’ or ‘restructure’ the political system under the slogan of ‘socialist pluralism,’ whereby the KGB would infiltrate newly-allowed independent parties. “By that time most party leaders were mainly occupied by the problem of personal survival,” to be accomplished by pocketing Communist Party funds for themselves and transferring them to foreign bank accounts. When things began to spin out of control in Eastern Europe, as they had done in Central Europe, Gorbachev didn’t hesitate to send in the troops, which performed “mass killings” in Tbilisi (1989), Baku (1990), Vilnius (1991), as the Chinese comrades did at Tiananmen Square in 1989. When the disorders reached Moscow itself, Gorbachev’s days at the summit of Soviet power were just about finished. 

But not for want of support from the West. Even such firm anti-communists as Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lauded him to the end. “This was the tragedy of our time, that if one part of humanity had a perfect understanding of the essence of the communist idea (but sympathized with it), the other part, seemingly hostile to it, did not understand it, believing the symptoms of the disease to be the disease itself. People who understood that it was the communist idea that was the root of all evil, that the regime is not inhuman because it persecutes people for their convictions, but, on the contrary, does everything because it is inhuman—were few and far between,” and fewer still of those belonged to “the establishment” in the West. There were more “real anti-communists” in the Soviet Union than there were in the West. In the case of Thatcher, Bukovsky enjoyed the genuine if poignant pleasure of showing her, in 1992, documentary proof that Gorbachev had signed off on funneling a million dollars to striking British coal miners in 1984, a move Gorbachev had assured Thatcher he knew nothing about. “This was my long-awaited moment of triumph: ‘The difficulty of “doing business” with communists is that they have the disgusting habit of lying while looking you in the face,’ I said slowly and clearly, enjoying every word.” There are limitations to the capitalist mindset. “Alas, the conservatives proved totally incapable of grasping the principles of ideological warfare.” (Here, one might give a bit of credit to those frivolous Americans, who did in fact sponsor anti-communist radio broadcasts into the Soviet empire throughout the decades of the Cold War.)

“Despite all our efforts, even the more conservative Western circles did not want to understand that dozens and hundreds of millions behind the Iron Curtain were their natural and most powerful allies and not a ‘humanitarian problem.’ Communism could only really be defeated together with them.” But without a strategy based on building up civil, not uncivil, society in Soviet Russia there could be no well-organized struggle against the Communists there. “Weak and inexperienced opposition forces needed forging in the process of fighting the old regime in order to develop into a proper political structure, capable of sweeping the nomenklatura from all levels of state rule. Only a struggle like this could produce real leaders, popular organizers in every district, in every industrial plant, thereby creating a genuine political alternative” to the Communists. “Without this struggle there could be no system changes, and the new putative system would not have the necessary support.” Upon returning to Russia, Bukovsky advocated a general strike, which would have been a peaceful way of confronting a regime now in disarray but still capable of regrouping, while simultaneously setting up conditions in which anti-communists could organize themselves and begin to run the country. “This was the core of the problem: the country was ready to throw the regime out, but it was the new elite that was not ready, the new ‘democrats’ that grew up under perestroika,” under Gorbachev’s fake liberalization. The result was the rule of the hapless drunk, Boris Yeltsin, who blundered along long enough for the Communists to repackage themselves as Russian nationalists. 

Enter Vladimir Putin.