Re-Possessed
Who could have foreseen how much the 20th century would differ from the relatively placid and optimistic 19th? In the years between 1800 and 1900, for the first time in world history, average people were getting dependably richer. Monarchies were giving way to republics. Liberal ideas were spreading. And intellectuals overwhelmingly endorsed “progress,” by which they meant not just improvement but a world in which natural law seemed to guarantee endless betterment.
It didn’t work out. In addition to two world wars taking the lives of tens of millions, the 20th century created something new, the system we have come to call totalitarianism. Invented by Lenin, and then imitated by Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, and others, it came to dominate some 40 percent of humanity. It also captivated intellectuals in traditionally free societies—not in spite of, but because of, its unprecedented violence. When Stalin was succeeded by the much milder Khrushchev and Brezhnev, intellectuals lost interest in the USSR and idolized Mao instead.
Before the 20th century, the Spanish Inquisition was the Western exemplar of political repression, but the 30,000 or so who died at its hands in its 300-year history was exceeded approximately every two weeks in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The collectivization of agriculture alone took well over 10 million lives. In the opening paragraph of his classic 426-page study of this episode, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest observed that “in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”
Only one major thinker foresaw this turn of events: Fyodor Dostoevsky. He not only predicted that oppression would grow, he also outlined in detail what forms it would take. These predictions occur in a book usually considered the greatest political novel ever written, The Possessed—more accurately translated as The Devils. After Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s murders (some of them, anyway) in 1956, the prominent literary scholar Yuri Karyakin, who had once been a true believer, experienced the revelations as “an earthquake,” saying, “We read The Devils and the notebooks [Dostoevsky kept while writing] the novel . . . and did not believe our eyes. . . . We read and interrupted each other almost on every page: ‘It can’t be. How could he have known all this?’”
How indeed? The short answer is that Dostoevsky was not only a keen observer of the revolutionary movement but had been a revolutionary himself. Arguably the greatest psychologist who ever lived, he probed, partly by introspection, the revolutionary mind-set and recognized with horror that, in the right circumstances, he, too, could have participated in revolutionary killings.
The Devils, published in 1873, is a fictionalized account of a sensational murder committed three years earlier by the terrorist Sergei Nechaev—a fanatic committed to the idea that literally anything was justified to promote “the cause.” Lenin, who greatly admired Nechaev, agreed. Dostoevsky was less interested in the specifics of the Nechaev case than in what it revealed and foreshadowed. He explained that he wanted to present “not a description of a particular occurrence in Moscow” but the essence of revolutionary violence itself.
Given the atmosphere of intellectual intolerance in which he wrote, Dostoevsky knew that he risked opprobrium. His liberal enemy and fellow novelist Ivan Turgenev might temporize, he reasoned, but for Dostoevsky, the danger he detected loomed too large for anything less than the full truth. “I want to speak out as passionately as I can,” he wrote to one friend. “All the Nihilists and Westernizers will cry out that I am retrograde. To hell with them. I will speak my mind to the very last word.”
Like Nechaev, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the novel’s central character, has convinced everyone in the provincial town where the novel is set that he represents a vast revolutionary organization, with its central committee in Switzerland and countless followers throughout Russia. Also like his model, Pyotr Stepanovich masterfully spreads exciting myths about himself. Young men looking for a romantic hero are flattered by his attention.
Pyotr Stepanovich organizes his followers into “quintets,” groups of five whose only contact with other quintets is through Pyotr Stepanovich himself, a structure supposedly insuring that even if the members of one quintet are arrested, they cannot betray any others. It is actually designed to maximize Pyotr Stepanovich’s power to spread disinformation. The real Nechaev was tried for murder after he persuaded four members of his quintet to murder the fifth to prevent the man from informing. Nechaev’s real plan was to bind the others to him as accomplices in crime. Pyotr Stepanovich commits just such a murder, which Dostoevsky describes in an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and “mystical terror” that was his signature.
The murder victim, Ivan Shatov, has abandoned his former revolutionary convictions (like Dostoevsky himself) and become a believer in the Russian people and “the Russian God.” His death becomes all the more moving because he has just experienced the most joyous moments of his life after his ex-wife, who left him after two weeks of marriage and is now pregnant by another man, returns to him. Resolving with enthusiasm to adopt the baby, Shatov also comes to the realization that goodness and meaning reside not in the right ideology but beyond all ideology in ordinary decency and compassion—a realization that would also occur to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, and other Soviet dissidents a century later.
Hoping to entice the novel’s other protagonist, Stavrogin, into serving as the movement’s charismatic figurehead, Pyotr Stepanovich brings him to a meeting of young radicals. To avert suspicion, they have gathered on the pretext of celebrating the host’s name day (the Russian equivalent of a birthday, an occasion that instead commemorates the saint with whom the celebrant shares his Christian name). One of the host’s relatives, identified simply as “the major,” innocently shows up uninvited to participate in the ostensible celebration.
From the meeting’s first moment, young people vie to outdo each other repeating revolutionary clichés taken as scientific fact, including the necessity of abolishing every religion, all traditions, and received morality. At last, an ideologue named Shigalyov insists on explaining his irrefutable “system” for establishing earthly paradise.
“I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start,” Shigalyov commences. “Starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution to the social problem but mine.” And indeed, that is how it always is with modern revolutionary movements: The promise of absolute liberty leads to the worst possible slavery, just as the call for fraternity leads to the guillotine, and the ideal of equality to the domination of the few over the many.
Reading this passage, Dostoevsky’s contemporaries would surely have thought of the example of the Jacobins who brutalized the French a few years after their revolution in 1789. But Shigalyov advocates a much more ambitious tyranny closely resembling modern totalitarianism. His admirer, “the lame teach-er,” explains: “He suggests as a final solution of the [social] question the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like the Garden of Eden.” As Dostoevsky well knew, intellectuals naturally favor governments where educated “experts” (themselves) wield power. The Soviets called such an arrangement “true” democracy, much as today’s elites embrace undemocratic means to “preserve democracy.”
One radical objects to Shigalyov’s paradise: “If I didn’t know what to do with nine-tenths of mankind,” he explains, “I’d take them and blow them up into the air instead of putting them in paradise. I’d only leave a handful of educated people, who would live happily ever afterwards on scientific principles.” To be sure, this solution would entail “cutting off a hundred million heads.” But the real-world version of Shigalyov’s vision eventually devoured even more than that. Mao used this very argument when advocating nuclear war. A hundred million heads: As several commentators have pointed out, that is the number that appears in The Black Book of Communism, a painstaking 1997 effort to document the destruction of humanity in the name of Marxism-Leninism, as the bare minimum of Communist killings.
Bored by this collection of fools, Stavrogin walks out of the meeting, with Pyotr Stepanovich following so he can explain his revolutionary plans in more detail. He endorses Shigalyov’s idea of “a system of spying. Every member of the society spies on the others, and it’s his duty to inform against them. Everyone belongs to all and all to everyone.” East Germany came pretty close to this. And the Chinese Communist Party, in its campaign in the early 1950s against what it called “the five antis” (basically a war on private property) provided what historian Frank Dikötter called “denunciation boxes, bright red with a small slit at the top, allowing anyone in China to denounce anyone else of thought crimes.” Think how much more effective such surveillance would be (indeed, already is) with today’s technology.
Pyotr Stepanovich explains that achieving “equality” of result rather than equality of opportunity is the goal, and it demands the suppression of all individuality, all genius, all great intellects. “All are slaves and equal in their slavery,” he instructs. It follows that “the level of education, science, and talents is lowered.” When I hear people wondering why woke educators do not see that teaching math without demanding correct answers—let alone closing schools altogether for a lengthy period—is bound to foster ignorance, I cannot help but wonder whether ignorance is, in fact, the goal. As Pyotr Stepanovich reasons, one cannot make people equal by raising the bar but only by lowering it: “To level the mountain is a fine idea,” he tells Stavrogin. “In the herd there is bound to be equality.”
Mao concurred. As he famously observed when the Cultural Revolution closed schools, “The more you study, the stupider you become.” In the name of equality and revolutionary zeal, accomplished professors in Mao’s China were beaten by their students, paraded through the streets wearing dunce camps, and consigned to arduous manual labor. As Dikötter remarks, “Here were some of the country’s most eminent scientists, physicians, engineers and philosophers, far away from their laboratories and offices, forced to do hard physical labor, shoveling mud, baking brick, collecting twigs, or hauling manure. On one occasion, a mathematician trained in Cambridge and a physicist with a doctoral dissertation from Moscow University attempted [unsuccessfully] to slaughter a pig.” Soon enough, students themselves were dispatched to the countryside to “learn from the masses” through pointless agricultural work. Libraries were burned, ancient manuscripts destroyed, and classic artwork annihilated on a scale so colossal that, if not for what was preserved in Taiwan or unearthed later, Chinese cultural history would have been largely erased.
Dostoevsky foresaw all this. Pyotr Stepanovich promises that talented people will be banished or put to death. “Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned…. Down with culture…. We’ll stifle every genius in its infancy…. Complete equality!…. Only the necessary is necessary.” Under the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s in Cambodia, we recall, wearing glasses or any other sign of literacy was fatal. To create a blank slate on which it could inscribe a new human nature, the Khmer Rouge deemed all Cambodian tradition, folk as well as educated, “anathema that must be destroyed.”
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It is telling that Dostoevsky directs his most savage attacks in The Devils not at the radicals but at the liberals who fawn on them. Here, too, he proved prophetic. In the years leading to the Bolshevik takeover, the liberal party known as the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) refused to condemn terrorism and other violence completely at odds with their own professed values as long as the barbarities came from parties to their left. They became the Bolsheviks’ first victims.
Pyotr Stepanovich understands precisely what motivates such liberals: “I could make them go through fire,” he tells Stavrogin. “One has only to din it into them that they are not advanced enough.” Supposedly rejecting all authority, they are “ashamed to have an opinion of their own.” They favor the guillotine, explains one character, because it is easier to cut off heads than to think through an idea. Shatov calls their mind-set “flunkeyism of thought.”
Then and now, those who consider themselves the most advanced among us often espouse absolute drivel, the very absurdity of which demonstrates their progressive credentials. Any uneducated slob, after all, can resort to common sense. In the presence of young radicals, even “genuine and quite indubitable celebrities” become “humbler than the grass…shamefully cringing before them.” Worst of all is “the great writer Karmazinov”—closely based on Turgenev—who “trembled nervously before the revolutionary youth of Russia” and “fawned upon them in a despicable way, chiefly because they paid no attention to him whatever.” Like Turgenev, Karmazinov claims to accept all the radicals’ beliefs except their hostility to art. When even this fawning proves inadequate, Karmazinov in effect replies: “I am not the sort of man you think, I am on your side, only praise me, praise me more, as much as possible, I like it extremely.”
Dostoevsky recognized that most young radicals are genuine idealists. Unfortunately, so does Pyotr Stepanovich, who knows how to exploit their naiveté, as do his real-life counterparts. There is always a spectrum of awareness. Many don’t even know they work for “the cause.”
“I’ve reckoned them all up,” Pyotr Stepanovich explains. “A teacher who laughs with children at their God…is on our side…. The prosecutor who trembles at a trial for fear he should not seem advanced enough is ours, ours. Among officials and literary men, we have lots, lots, and they don’t know it themselves.” Citing the 19th-century Russian equivalents of “defund the police” and “white privilege,” he concludes: “Do you know how many we will catch by little, ready-made ideas?… Every scurvy group will be of use. Out of these groups I’ll pick you out fellows so keen that they’ll not shrink from shooting, and be grateful for the honor of a job, too.”
When others at the meeting endorse revolutionary violence, the major whom no one invited replies: “I confess I am rather in favor of a more humane policy …but as all are on the other side, I go with all the rest.” And so among us, people who never hated Jews before endorse Hamas. Anyone who wonders how our traditionally liberal society could be yielding so readily to anti-Semitism and quasi-Marxist ideologies should read The Devils, and not just for the purposes of literary edification. A prediction, after all, can come true more than once.