Stalinism for All Seasons by Vladimir Tismăneanu

Situating the rise and fall of Romanian communism within the world revolutionary movement, Stalinism for All Seasons shows that the history of communism in one country can illuminate the development of communism in the twentieth century. Tismaneanu analyzes both the main events in Romanian communism and the role of significant personalities in the party’s history. Vladimir Tismaneanu uses documents that he discovered while working in the RCP archives in Bucharest in the mid-1990s and interviews with many of the party members from the Ceau_escu and Gheorghiu-Dej eras to tell the absorbing story of how RCP members came to power as exponents of Moscow and succeeded in turning themselves into champions of autonomy. It traces the origins of the once-tiny, clandestine revolutionary organization in the 1920s through the years of national power from 1944 to 1989 to the post-1989 metamorphoses of its members. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.Stalinism for All Seasons is the first comprehensive history of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP). Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals.

The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements-people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering.

The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism.

Stalinism for All Seasons by Vladimir Tismăneanu