As a matter of principle, the comparison between Nazism and Communism strikes me as both morally and scholarly justifiable, at least because we can see enough similar as well as dissimilar elements to justify such a comparison. To deny this comparison (which after all inspired one of the great works of political and moral philosophy of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, and was developed not by right-wingers but by such democratic socialists as the Mensheviks) is a proof of self-imposed intellectual narrow-mindedness.95 Michael Scammell emphasized that “we cannot choose between our memory of Auschwitz and our memory of the Gulag, because history has mandated that we remember them both.”96 Scholars are not judges, and the confusion between these two roles can make some scholars oblivious to important distinctions. Comparison serves the work of understanding when it is used to highlight both similarities and differences.
François Furet insisted in his correspondence with Ernst Nolte that there is something absolutely evil in Nazi practice, both at the level of original intention and the implementation of Utopian goals. This is not to minimize in any way the abominations of Communism, but simply to recognize that, comparable as the two mass horrors are, there is something truly singular about the Holocaust and the manic perfection and single-mindedness of the Nazi Final Solution. Nazi ideology was founded upon what historian Enzo Traverso called “redemptive violence.” Its ethos merges anti-Semitism with “a ‘religion of nature’ based on blind faith in biological determinism to the point where genocide itself came to represent both ‘a disinfection, a purification—in short an ecological measure’ and a ritual act of sacrifice performed to redeem history from chaos and decadence [my emphasis].”97
In the case of the Soviet Union, after the war on the peasants, the Stalinist repressive machine, especially during the Great Terror, attacked all social strata. This form of repression had a distinctive volatile and unpredictable character. Hysteria was universal and unstoppable. Any citizen could be targeted. From this point of view, one could argue that Stalinist terror was more inclusive, amorphous, but also porous because it represents both “the extreme penalization of types of social behavior” and victimization based on “political-ideological standards for rooting out deviant language and ‘bad’ class origins.”98 Starting with Lenin and worsening with Stalin, the comprehensive grasp of state violence in the USSR revealed “an instant readiness to declare war on the rest of society” (as Scammel says). The result was that, according to Nicolas Werth, one in five adult males passed through the gulag. Here, one should also keep in mind the post-1945 campaign against “female thieves” (in reality war widows) or the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility to twelve in 1935.
In Nazi Germany terror was unleashed mainly against minorities (Jews, Roma, the disabled, or gays) and foreign populations. In the Soviet Union, terror brought about two worlds: the Soviet social body, made up of politically validated people, and the gulag, with the party and its repressive institutions mediating between the two realms. While in Nazi Germany the regime sought “its victims mainly outside the Volksgemeinschaft, the Soviet populace was the main victim of its own regime.” In other words, the war conducted by Stalin and the Leninist parties was internal, “a catastrophe ostensibly launched as a social upheaval, appropriating the idiom of class struggle and civil war.”99 Along similar lines, Richard Overy provides an excellent definition of the gulag, which in his view “symbolizes the political corruption and hypocrisy of a regime formally committed to human progress, but capable of enslaving millions in the process.”100 The state-building Stalinist blueprint, the one that became the core of the “civilizational transfer” implied by exporting revolution or Sovietization, was “dialectically” bent on purification andinclusiveness. This paradox is best expressed by the contrast between the 1936 constitution's description of a society made up of “non-antagonistic classes” and Stalin's November 1937 call for eradicating not just the enemies of the people but also their “kith and kin.”101
One can conclude that, in the Soviet Union at different stages, certain groups were indeed designated targets, but the exercise of terror applied to individuals of all social origins (workers, peasants, intellectuals, party and military cadres, former middle and high bourgeois, priests, even secret police officials). Soviet terror had a distinctly random character, for its sole purpose was the building of Communism through the total homogenization of society. Its rationale was the moral-political unity of the community. From this point of view, the violence inflicted on the population was ideologically functionalized. It never achieved the industrial scope of the Holocaust. It was, however, an end in itself. It was the other face of the Bolshevik regime's “modern agenda of subjectiviztion.” Those individuals who failed to become “conscious citizens engaged in the program of building socialism of their own will,” those who failed to understand their obligations as members of “the first socialist state,” those who erred in revolutionary vigilance, in other words “the failed hermeneuticists” of the great leap out of the empire of necessity became excess to the needs of the Soviet state. The Bolsheviks were interested in refashioning the human soul. The life of the individual could make sense only if it immersed itself in the “general stream of life” of the Soviet collective.102 It is no surprise that, as Orlando Figes remarks, the Russian word forconscience (sovest') as a private dialogue with the inner self almost disappeared from official use after 1917. On October 26, 1932, Stalin described the full nature of the Bolshevik transformation: “Your tanks will be worth nothing if the soul (dusha) in them is rotten. No, the ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”103
In the summer of 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, the output of the Bolshevik industry of souls was already on display: over 40,000 participants gathered for a physical culture parade on the Red Square entitled “The Parade of the Powerful Stalin Breed [plemia]” (my emphasis). At the end of the celebrations of the first decade of the existence of Fascist Italy, the newspaper Gioventù fascista gave an almost archetypical description of the totalitarian body politic: “With Fascism, a crowd has become a harmony of souls, a perfect fit of citizens actively participating in the great life of the State…. [T]his was a crowd with self-knowledge, aware of its obedience, its faith, and its fighting mettle, a crowd serene and secure, trusting in its Leader, in a State…. This was no faceless throng, but an image given shape and order by spirits educated in the epic of these new times; not an amorphous mass, but an amalgam of fresh values and intelligence.”104 The imagery employed by the Italian journalists would have surely been fitting for the rows of thousands of Soviet New Men and Women participating in the parade of the “powerful Stalin breed,” expressing the joy of these crowds celebrating their happiness and fortune to be offspring of utopia made reality under the guidance of the beloved Helmsman (Vozhd). What is striking in the passage, from the point of view of our discussion of Fascism and Communism, is the constancy of the signified despite the interchangeability of the key signifiers.
Even when it did not take on a directly exterminist profile (e.g., mass executions, death marches, and state-engineered starvation), Soviet terror took the form of forced labor whose economic utility was highly questionable. I disagree with Dan Diner on this point, for I consider that forced labor in the gulag had a primarily pedagogical and corrective character. In both Nazism and Stalinism, the camps fundamentally served an ideological function; all other aspects that could be assigned to them were epiphenomena to the ideological driving force of the two dictatorships.105 In the Soviet Union, the labor camps were “a cultural model,” a “peculiar wedding of discipline and representation,” which ensured that those inside would be trained and those outside terrorized. Most importantly, this negative model of organization within the Communist space was employed for the structuring and disciplining of even positive social milieus, such as factories and universities.106 Until 1956, the gulag was the blueprint of human management in the USSR. As Orlando Figes notes, it was “more than a source of labor for building projects like the White Sea Canal. It was itself a form of industrialization.”107 I would go even further: the gulag was the normative design at the basis of the Communist project of modernity, the original source of the misdevelopment brought about by all Soviet-type regimes.
Exploitation by the state had, indeed, its productive purpose, but it was a consequence and an extension of the institution of the camp and deportation site as places of anthropological transformation. It is true that “the Final Solution was a project annulling even what are broadly considered universally valid standards of self-preservation.”108 But I think it is misguided to force upon Communist terror qualifications on the basis of circumstances and utility while ignoring its purifying and standardizing motifs.109 To paraphrase Timothy Snyder, Stalinism's project of self-colonization by mass terror was founded upon the indifference to individual human life. Stalinism and Nazism's terror were “built into the world view of each dictator and each dictatorship; it was essential to the system, not a mere instrument of control, and it was practiced at every level of society.”110 Under Communism mass murder became a certainty because of the inevitable violence resulting from the corroboration of the principle of the state (gosudarstvennost) and the struggle to create order out of what Leninist leaders perceived as stikhiinost, social chaos.111
Moreover, Timothy Snyder warns that if we single-mindedly focus on Auschwitz and the gulag, “we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.”112 Snyder, while stressing the singularity of Nazi atrocities, demonstrates what he calls “the absence of economics”: “Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational…. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic development. If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality [my emphasis].”113 In Bloodlands Snyder takes his point further. He argues, in his reassessment of the monstrous chasm generated by the exterminist policies of Stalinism and Nazism, for a revision of our premises for comprehending such cataclysm: “Fourteen million people were deliberately murdered by two regimes over twelve years. This is the moment that we have scarcely begun to understand let alone master.”114 During the twentieth century, “history had truly become a delinquent.”115 Snyder is right: the only solution to this pathology of modernity is “the ethical commitment to the individual.” This is also the fundamental lesson of the revolutions of 1989, the legacy of dissidents like Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Patočka, Václav Havel, Jacek Kuroń, Bronisław Geremek, Adam Michnik, János Kis, and George Konrád. That is exactly why I consider the revolutions of 1989 the endpoint of the historical era ruled by utopia.
The most important conclusion to draw from the comparison of terror dynamics in the two cases is that both regimes (radical Leninism or Stalinism and Nazism) were genocidal. Norman Naimark excellently describes this reality: “The two great tyrannies of the twentieth century simply share too much in common to reject out of hand attempts to classify and order them in the history of political systems and genocide.”116 Analytical distinctions between them are certainly important, but their common contempt for the bourgeois state of law, human rights, and the universality of humankind, regardless of spurious race and class distinctions, is in my view beyond doubt. Any student of the “age of extremes” would have to acknowledge that Leninism contained all the political and ideological ingredients of the totalitarian order (the party's monopoly on power, ideological uniformity and regimentation, censorship, demonization of the “people's enemy,” a besieged fortress mentality, secret police terror, concentration camps, and, no less important, the obsession with shaping the “New Man”). To paraphrase Dan Diner, Communism and National Socialism, because of the terrible crimes they committed, “embedded themselves in the memory of the twentieth century as twins of terror.”117
For totalitarian experiments to be successful, terror and ideology are mandatory instruments for exerting power. A statement by Boris Souvarine, the author of a path-breaking and still impressively valid biography of Stalin published in the mid-1930s, perfectly encapsulates the convergent nature of Communism and Fascism: “In the early years of the Russian Revolution, it was easy to put everything down to the idea of ‘Slavic soul'; yet the events that were reputed to be exclusively Slavic phenomena have subsequently been witnessed in Italy and Germany. When the beast in man is unleashed, the same consequences are visible everywhere, irrespective of whether the man in question is Latin, German, or Slav, however different he may appear on the surface.”118 The cold pathological rationality of the Nazi war on the Jews, including the use of mass murder technologies at Auschwitz and the other death factories, could not be anticipated by the Marxist apostate Boris Souvarine in this diagnosis written in 1937. Nevertheless, he was right in regarding the strange blending of barbarism and derailed modernity in the ideological despotisms of the extreme Left and Right.
Again, comparing the two absolute disgraces of the twentieth century, the gulag and the Holocaust, often leads to misunderstandings and injured feelings among victims of one or another of these monstrosities. This is regrettable because, in all fairness, none of these experiences will ever be remembered enough. Yes, as Alain Besançon points out, there is a kind of amnesia regarding the Communist crimes, just as there is a hypermnesia in relation to the Shoah.119 But as the French historian shows, this is not because there is an attempt by one group to monopolize the memory of suffering in the twentieth century. The origins of this phenomenon are to be sought after in the fact that Communism was often regarded as progressive, anti-imperialist, and, more important still, anti-Fascist. Communism knew how to pose as the heir to the Enlightenment, and many were duped by this rationalistic and humanistic pretense. So, in my view, the research agenda initially suggested by The Black Book presupposed a rethinking not only of Communism and Fascism but also of their opposites, anti-Fascism and anti-Communism. In other words, not all those who resisted Hitler were friends of democracy, and not all those who rebelled against Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Castro were bona fide liberals. The Black Book forced many in France, Germany, the United States, and, if it need be recalled, East-Central Europe to admit that those “who told of the marvels of the Soviet Union served to legitimize the massacre of millions…. [They] fooled their own societies into seeing the millions of corpses as a great promise for a better future.”120 The uproar caused by The Black Book helped bring to the fore the need both for remembrance of Communism's crimes and for reassessment of the massive killing and dying perpetrated by so many regimes in the name of this ideology with the endorsement of those who preferred to keep their eyes and ears firmly shut.121
As far as the anamnesis of Leninist violence, one fundamental problem is that the subjects of trauma mostly belong to social categories rather than national, ethnic ones (as in the case of the Holocaust). This issue is directly connected with the difference discussed above: Communism was at war with its own society. Even under its most moderate avatars (Kádár's Hungary, Gorbachev's USSR, or contemporary China), when a section of society threatened the existence of the system, the repressive (quasi-terroristic) levers were activated to isolate and extirpate the “pest hole.” Under the circumstances, Diner's framing of the dilemma is noteworthy: “The memory of ‘sociocide,’ class murder, is archived, not transmitted from one generation to another as is the case with genocide…. How can crimes that elude the armature of an ethnic, and thus long-term, memory be kept alive in collective remembrance? Can crimes perpetrated not in the name of a collective, such as the nation, but in the name of a social construction, such as class, be memorialized in an appropriate form?”122 It was often the case that such a query was solved through the artificial creation of “ethnic armature.” In the former Soviet bloc, Communism was sold as mainly a Russian import, while local leaders fell into a vaguely defined category of collaborators or “elements foreign to the nation.” It was just a step from the last coinage to the rejuvenation of the old specter ofZydokomuna. But the crux of the problem is that, despite the efforts of Courtois and the other authors of the Black Book, a unitary death tool might be possible but a collective, transnational memory of Communism's crimes does not exist. In the early twenty-first century, through the various pan-European documents that have been adopted by the European Union or the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the first steps in this direction have been made. The Leninist experiment (that is, the world Communist movement) dissolved into national narratives of trauma and guilt upon the ideology's extinction. Terror and mass murder seem to still keep Communist states separated in terms of both memory and history. And considerable challenges remain in integrating the massive trauma caused by Communist regimes into what we call today European history.
The problem is that most of the crimes are also crimes of national Communist regimes; that is to say, the gulag (I use the term here as a metaphor for all mass terror under Communism) is also a fratricide. Additionally, these regimes endured for more than a score of years, as they domesticized and entered into a post-totalitarian phase. How to measure accomplished lifetimes against stolen ones? One possible solution is to accept the fact that Leninism is radical evil, so that its crimes can be universally (or continentally) remembered and memorialized. This way, unilateral appropriation of trauma, ethnicization of terror, and collective silence can be prevented. Each individual case could maintain its specificities but would, at the same time, be part of a larger historical phenomenon, thus being assimilated to public consciousness. The authors of theBlack Book condemned what they considered both an institutionalized and informal amnesia about the true nature of Communist regimes. Their accounts were supposed to provoke the necessary intimacy and ineffability for a sacralized memory of the gulag. Since then, some headway has been made along this path, but European identification with sites of its memory (in various countries) is still pending.123 We should not forget that in 2000, in Stockholm, during the international conference on the Holocaust (commemorating fifty-five years since the liberation of Auschwitz), the participants stated that “the normative basis of a transnational political community is defined by exposing and remembering inhuman barbarism, cruelty and unimaginable humiliation, which are unthinkable on the background of our collective existence.” To paraphrase Helmut Dubiel, the traumatic contemplation of absolute horror and of the total miscarriage of civility legitimizes an ethics that goes beyond the border of any individual state.124
To return to the Black Book, I wish to emphasize that the key point concerning its legacy is the legitimacy of the comparison between National Socialism and Leninism. I agree here with the Polish-French historian Krzysztof Pomian's approach:
It is undeniable that mass crimes did take place, as well as crimes against humanity, and this is the merit of the team that put together The Black Book: to have brought the debate regarding twentieth century communism into public discussion; in this respect, as a whole, beyond the reservations that one can hold concerning one page or another, it has played a remarkable role…. To say that the Soviets were worse because their system made more victims, or that the Nazis were worse because they exterminated the Jews, are two positions which are unacceptable, and the debate carried on under these terms is shocking and obscene.125
Indeed, the challenge is to avoid any “comparative trivialization,”126 or any form of competitive “martyrology” and to admit that, beyond the similarities, these extreme systems had unique features, including the rationalization of power, the definition of the enemy, and designated goals. The point, therefore, is to retrieve memory, to organize understanding of these experiments, and to try to make sense of their functioning, methods, and goals.
Some chapters of The Black Book succeed better than others, but as a whole the undertaking was justified. It was obviously not a neutral scholarly effort, but an attempt to comprehend some of the most haunting moral questions of our times: How was it possible for millions of individuals to enroll in revolutionary movements that aimed at the enslavement, exclusion, elimination, and finally extermination of whole categories of fellow human beings? What was the role of ideological hubris in these criminal practices? How could sophisticated intellectuals like the French poet Louis Aragon write odes to Stalin's secret police? How could Aragon believe in “the blue eyes of the revolution that burn with cruel necessity”? And how could the once acerbic critic of the Bolsheviks, the acclaimed proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, turn into an abject apologist for Stalinist pseudoscience, unabashedly calling for experiments on human beings: “Hundreds of human guinea pigs are required. This will be a true service to humanity, which will be far more important and useful than the extermination of tens of millions of healthy human beings for the comfort of a miserable, physically, psychologically, and morally degenerate class of predators and parasites.”127 The whole tragedy of Communism lies within this hallucinating statement: the vision of a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods, the denial of the right to life to those who are defined as “degenerate parasites and predators,” the deliberate dehumanization of the victims, and what Alain Besançon correctly identified as the ideological perversity at the heart of totalitarian thinking—the falsification of the idea of good (la falsification du bien).
I have strong reservations regarding theoretical distinctions on the basis of which some historians reach the conclusion that Communism is “more evil” than Nazism. In fact, they were both evil, even radically evil.128 Public awareness of Communist violence and terror has been delayed by the durability of Leninism's pretense of universality. Because of projection, it took a long time to achieve an agreement that Bolshevism was not another path to democracy and that its victims were overwhelmingly innocent.129 One cannot deny that Communism represented for many the onlyalternative (in my foreword I discuss a personal family example), especially with the rise of Fascism and of Hitler, at a time when liberal democracy seemed compromised.
Communism was consistently presented as synonymous with hope, but the dream turned into a nightmare: Communism “not only murdered millions, but also took away the hope.”130 Communism was founded upon “a version of a thirst for the sacred with a concomitant revulsion against the profane.” The Soviet “Great Experiment's master narrative involves the repurification or resacerdotalization of space.”131 This is why Furet, in his closing remarks to Passing of an Illusion, states that upon the moral and political collapse of Leninism we “are condemned to live in the world as it is” (p. 502). With a significantly stronger brush, Martin Malia argued that “any realistic account of communist crimes would effectively shut the door on Utopia; and too many good souls in this unjust world cannot abandon hope for an absolute end to inequality (and some less good souls will always offer them ‘rational’ curative nostrums). And so, all comrade-questers after historical truth should gird their loins for a very Long March indeed before Communism is accorded its fair share of absolute evil.”132 And, indeed, two important registers of criticism directed toward the process of revealing and remembering the crimes of Communist regimes were that of anti-anti-utopianism and anticapitalism. I will not dwell on the validity of counterpoising Communism with capitalism; it is a dead end. It just reproduces the original Manichean Marxist revolutionary ethos of the Communist Manifesto. It is endearing to a certain extent, for one's beliefs should be respected, but it is irrelevant if we seek to understand the tragedy of the twentieth century. The employment of anti-anti-utopianism in the discussion of left-wing totalitarianism is just another way of avoiding the truth. To reject the legitimacy of the comparison between National Socialism and Bolshevism on the basis of their distinct aims is utterly indecent and logically flawed. Ian Kershaw criticizes arguments based on the
different aims and intentions of Nazism and Bolshevism—aims which were wholly inhumane and negative in the former case and ultimately humane and positive in the latter case. The argument is based upon a deduction from the future (neither verifiable nor feasible) to the present, a procedure which in strict logic is not permissible…. The purely functional point that communist terror was “positive” because it was “directed towards a complete and radical change in society” whereas “fascist (i.e., Nazi) terror reached its highest point with the destruction of the Jews” and “made no attempt to alter human behavior or build a genuinely new society” is, apart from the debatable assertion in the last phrase, a cynical value judgment on the horrors of the Stalinist terror [my emphasis].133
Recognizing Communism as hope soaked in revolutionary utopia is truly a specter to turn away from. This hope materialized as radical evil can only lead to massacre, because “il cherche à s'incarner, et ce faisant, il ne peut faire autrement qu'éliminer ceux qui n'appartiennent pas à la bonne classe sociale, ceux qui résistent à ce projet d'espoir [it looks to take flesh, and doing this, it can only eliminate those who do not belong to the right social class, those who resist this project of hope].”134 Ronald Suny was right in emphasizing that we should not forget that the original aspirations of socialism “were the emancipatory impulses of the Russian Revolution as well.”135 It is difficult to see how this affects the “duty of remembrance” regarding Leninism's crimes. Not to mention that, as early as 1918, with the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People, the Bolsheviks detailed their ideal of social justice into categories of disenfranchised people (lishentsy), the prototype taxonomy for the terror that was to follow in the later years.136 Tony Judt puts it bluntly: “The road to Communist hell was undoubtedly paved with good (Marxist) intentions. But so what? … From the point of view of the exiled, humiliated, tortured, maimed or murdered victims, of course, it's all the same.”137 Furthermore, such shameful commonalities between socialism and Bolshevism should actually be an incentive to call things by their real name when it comes to the radical evil that Communism in power was throughout the twentieth century. The hope that Bolshevism brought to so many was a lie. The full impact of the lie can only be measured by the nightmare of the millions it murdered. The moral and political bankruptcy of the “pure” original ideals cannot remain hidden just for the sake of safeguarding their pristine state. The uproar provoked by the Black Book indicated a “continuing reluctance to take at face value the overwhelming evidence of crimes committed by communist regimes.”138 So many years after the book's publication, some things have changed, but much more remains to be done. To return to Kołakowski's metaphor, the devil not only incarnated itself in history, it also wrecked our memory of it.
Beyond debates about how to remember, compare, and analyze Communism and Fascism, there is a bottom line that all can accept. Perhaps with minimal difficulty all can agree with Emilio Gentile's conclusion that “totalitarian experiments, even if they were imperfect and flawed, involved, conditioned, transformed, deformed and ended the existence of millions of human beings. In no uncertain terms, this was determined by the conviction of the principal protagonists that they were the forebears of a new humanity, the builders of a new civilization, the interpreters of a new truth, the repositories for the discrimination between good and evil, and the masters of the destinies of those caught up in their enterprise.”139 At the end of the day, reflecting on the “why” of the whole Communist experience, one needs to remember that Leninism emerged from the meeting between a certain direction of European revolutionary socialism, one that could in no way come to terms with the established liberal order and the rights of the individual, and the Russian tradition of conspiratorial violence. The mixture of revolutionary anticapitalism and ultranationalist German racism led to Hitler's chiliastic dreams of Aryan supremacy.140 At a speech in the Berlin Sports Palace on February 10, 1933, Hitler formulated with religious fervor his “predestined mission” to resurrect the German nation: “For I cannot divest of my faith in my people, cannot dissociate myself from the conviction that this nation will one day rise again, cannot divorce myself from my love for this, my people, and I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us will hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen.”141 Similarly, Mussolini confessed in My Autobiography that “I felt the deep need for an original conception capable of bringing about a more fruitful rhythm of history in a new period of history. It was necessary to lay the foundation of a new civilization.” Fascism for Mussolini was the solution to “the Spiritual Crisis of Italy.”142 The same frenzy for “a new temporality and nomos,” alternative and opposite to that of liberal modernity, was also at the core of Communism. Such a sense of mission was apparent at the Congress of Victors (the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in January-February 1934, as the Soviet regime entered the second five-year plan and finalized the Cultural Revolution, after Stalin had murdered, starved, and deported millions of kulaks in Ukraine and forcibly resettled several ethnic groups, and as he consolidated his position as undisputed leader of the Bolshevik party. At such a “glorious moment,” almost two and a half years before the beginning of the Great Terror, Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich praised Stalin as the creator “of the greatest revolution that human history has ever known.”143
The plight of Communism's millions of victims (many of whom had once espoused the generous promises of the Marxian doctrine) cannot be explained without reference to the Leninist party and its attempt to forcibly impose the will of a small group of fanatics over reticent and more often than not hostile populations. Mikhail Bakunin put it most aptly in an angry letter disavowing Sergey Nechaev's apotheosis of destructive violence and psychological terrorism: “Out of that cruel renunciation and extreme fanaticism you now want to make a general principle applicable to the whole community. You want crazy things, impossible things, the total negation of nature, man, and society!”144 Communism and Fascism believed that fundamental change was possible. They engineered radical revolutionary projects in order to answer this belief.145 However, they enacted their utopias with complete disregard for individual human life. Their frantic acceleration of human development engendered the materialization of radical evil in history.