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116 ANDREA GRAZIOSIthat had spread throughout Europe before the war and that the war hadnourished: note, for example, the renewed interest in Cariyle or Spengler'ssuccess. It is interesting to note that in 1922 Piatakov devoted an essay preciselyto Spengler, attacking him for his glorification of the "velikoeiskusstvo povelevat' stikhiiami zhizni, osnovannoe na proniknovenii ν ееvozmozhnosti i na predvidenii ее khoda" that guaranteed the "new Caesar"the "kljuch к gospodvstu nad drugimi" and deriding his hymns to "beton,stal', zheleznye nervy і gosudarstvennykh muzhei." Six years later thesesame words neatly summed up an important part of both Piatakov's credoand that of his new comrades. 13This credo was not, of course, a monolith, and in Piatakov it took ratherpeculiar forms. In particular, the state of "exaltation" caused by the weightof the past and by that of betrayal meant that the "end of ideology" took onthe form of a descent into psychopathology. For example, in March 1928, inan emotional discussion he had with N. Valentinov immediately after hiscapitulation, Piatakov exalted the miracle party which could do anythingand which made anything possible (in Rakovskii's words, which guaranteed"power" to Piatakov and those like him). For the party, Piatakov said, aman must be prepared to do anything—to destroy himself, to betray his ownfriends, to change his own mind.Within a few months, for Piatakov, too, this miracle party took on thepersonal features of Stalin, the new miracle man able to make history jumpat his will. The ways in which these jumps were produced—the violence,the administrative pressure, the grubest'—took second place to the results.But then, Piatakov, like many others, recognized in these methods importantpieces of his own Civil War experience, when he, too, had orderedmass shootings, had been criticized by Lenin for his grubest', and had sentthe "mandarinnye etikety" to hell in the Donbass in order to obtain therequired results.state-building or rebuilding recently at work. It is a fact, however, that in the past one hundredyears or so, on an international scale, state-building has been the main component of socialism,and socialism, in its various "national socialistic" forms, has become the most important ideologyavailable to state-(re)builders. See also fns. 8 and 11.13This was a return to the times when, to use Otto Hintze's words, it was believed that "willpower, planning, and calculation" explained everything. In this sense, since Marxism had beenpart of the cultural movement which had fought and defeated these ideas, the new credo was an"anti-Marxist" one. Maxim Gorky's contribution to its birth, as well as to the development ofthe ideology used to "cover" it (to which Willi Münzenberg also greatly contributed), cannot beoverestimated. Gorky's half-baked, third rate "Nietzscheanism," his cynicism, and his great,creative capacities in the field of ideology were extremely appealing to Stalin and the otherautodidacts of his inner circle. From this point of view, the recently published Stalin-Gorky1929 correspondence is quite interesting and revealing.