1. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 395.
2. See Virgil Ierunca, Fenomenul Pitești (București: Humanitas, 1990). I also recommend the documentary Demascarea (The Unmasking), directed by Nicolae Mărgineanu, script by Alin Mureșan, produced by the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, Bucharest, 2011. The Pitești experiment was unleashed by local officers and their agents among the inmates based on orders coming from the highest Securitate echelons. It came to an end suddenly and inexplicably before Stalin's death, and the organizers, charged with conspiracy to compromise the Communist regime, were executed in 1954, carrying to the grave the secrets of the operation. The story, however, continued to circulate in Romanian prisons and reached the West in the 1960s.
3. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 408.
4. Peter Fritzsche, “On Being the Subjects of History: Nazis as Twentieth-Century Revolutionaries,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 151.
5. See Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).
6. See Leszek Kołakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 189.
7. According to Snyder, there were three periods in the mass murder perpetrated by the Soviet and Nazi regimes: “In the first (1933-1938), the Soviet Union carried out almost all of the mass killing; in the second, the German-Soviet alliance (1939-1941), the killing was balanced. Between 1941 and 1945 the Germans were responsible for almost all of the political murder.” Timothy Snyder,Bloodlands, p. 155. For a fascinating account of antifascism, see Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009), pp. 101-51; for the role of the Comintern's Agitprop international network and the crucial participation of Willi Münzenberg and his circle, see Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2003); and Jonathan Miles, The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). Espionage on behalf of Stalin, hostility to Hitler, and attraction to a utopian “other world” blended in experiences such as those of Katz or the Cambridge leftist enthusiasts.
8. Throughout the volume I will alternate between the terms totalitarianism and political religion. I chose to employ this conceptual parallelism because I consider that the two terms have complementary functions. Following Philippe Burrin, I believe that “totalitarianism sheds light on the mechanism of power and forms of domination, while political religion aims at the system of beliefs, rituals and symbols that establish and articulate this domination. Totalitarianism emphasizes the modernity of phenomena, particularly the techniques of power, while political religion draws attention to a long-term perspective and the historical sediment and modern reapplication of fragments of a religious culture for political purposes.” See Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (1997): 346n28.
9. Emilio Gentile, “Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics—A Critical Survey,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1 (June 2005): 19-32. Gentile provides the following definition of “the sacralization of politics”: “This process takes place when, more or less elaborately and dogmatically, a political movement confers a sacred status on an earthly entity (the nation, the country, the state, humanity, society, race, proletariat, history, liberty, or revolution) and renders it an absolute principle of collective existence, considers it the main source of values for individual and mass behavior, and exalts it as the supreme ethical precept of public life.” Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 1 (2000): 18-55.
10. Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution, pp. 1-20.
11. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 249.
12. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, “Introduction. The Regimes and their Dictators: Perspectives of Comparison,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 25.
13. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 4.
14. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 71-72. See also the impressive documentation in Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (New York: Random House, 2004).
15. See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
16. Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 310.
17. See the pioneering volume edited by Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism; Marc Ferro, ed., Nazisme et communisme: Deux régimes dans le siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1999); Henri Rousso, ed., Stalinisme et nazisme: Histoire et mémoire comparées (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1999); Shlomo Avineri and Zeev Sternhell, eds., Europe's Century of Discontent: The Legacies of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003); Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
18. See Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 1-24.
19. See Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 483-580.
20. Arthur Koestler, The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 15.
21. See Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” in Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin, The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 154-65.
22. Richard Overy, The Dictators, pp. 303-6.
23. Hans Maier, “Political Religions and Their Images: Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7, no. 3 (September 2006): 273.
24. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 239-40.
25. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 30.
26. Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev, ed. Albert Resis (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 2007), pp. 262 and 270.
27. It can hardly be considered a coincidence the fact that the term byvshie liudi (former people), which became commonplace in Bolshevik speak, implied that those to whom it applied were not quite human. Moreover, according to Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, the term lishentsy, which became a legal category, etymologically “was related to the superfluous man (lishnii chelovek) of 19th century Russian literature.” Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World—from Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 204.
28. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 249. Molotov's case is particularly baffling on the matter of loyalty to party-state vs. loyalty to one's family. His wife, old Bolshevik and Central Committee member Polina Zhemchuzhina, was accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism in 1949. When the Politburo gathered to decide her fate, Molotov dared to abstain from voting. A few days later, he apologized for his conduct, praising the “rightful” punishment decided by the Soviet motherland for his spouse. He subsequently divorced her, opting for unflinching loyalty to Stalin. Upon the dictator's death, Polina came back from deportation. She remarried Molotov, and they lived happily ever after. Zhemchuzhina never criticized her husband and never publicly denounced Stalin's murderous regime. All in all, it could be said that she was the epitome of “the comrade in life and in struggle,” as the Communist magnates' spouses used to be called. Molotov's grandson, Vyacheslav Nikonov, is currently an influential Russian political commentator close to Vladimir Putin.
29. David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 214. Yaroslavsky's wife, Klavdia Kirsanova (1888-1947), was the rector of the Comintern's Leninist School. See Pierre Broué, Histoire de l'Internationale Communiste: 1919-1943 (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 1025.
30. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 235.
31. Pierre Hassner, “Beyond History and Memory,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henri Rousso, English language edition edited and introduced by Richard J. Golsan, trans. Lucy B. Golsan, Thomas C. Hilde, and Peter S. Rogers (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 283-85.
32. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 24-25.
33. Michael Geyer (with assistance from Sheila Fitzpatrick), “Introduction: After Totalitarianism—Stalinism and Nazism Compared,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, pp. 1-37.
34. Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1943-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.
35. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 315.
36. The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, p. 66. For fascinating details regarding the publication of Dimitrov's diary as well as of other essential books in the Yale University Press series Annals of Communism, see Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia (New York: Atlas, 2008).
37. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 321.
38. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 370.
39. See Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
40. Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization, pp. 37-47.
41. Ibid., p. 421.
42. Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), p. 78.
43. Quoted in Gentile and Mallett, “The Sacralization of Politics,” pp. 28-29.
44. Overy, The Dictators, p. 650.
45. Felix Patrikeeff, “Stalinism, Totalitarian Society and the Politics of ‘Perfect Control,'” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 40.
46. Overy, The Dictators, p. 306.
47. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Politics as Practice: Thoughts on a New Soviet Political History” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 27-54. For S. Kotkin's insight on “speaking Bolshevik,” J. Hellbeck's description of “personal Bolshevism,” and Volkov's discussion of the identitarian function of kul'turnost', see Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-1938,” Janrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, no. 2 (1997); and Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul'turnost'— Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism—New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 210-30.
48. Michael Halberstam, “Hannah Arendt on the Totalitarian Sublime and Its Promise of Freedom,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 105-23.
49. Overy, The Dictators; Peter Fritzsche, “Genocide and Global Discourse,” German History 23, no. 1 (2005): 109; Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), p. 98; Geyer, “Introduction,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 33; Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
50. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 193. For an extensive discussion of the relationship between “sense-making crisis” and Fascism, see Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman, eds., Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, vol. 2, The Social Dynamics of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 2004).
51. See Eric Voegelin, “The Political Religions,” in Modernity without Restraint: Collected Works (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 5:19-74.
52. Historian Stephen Kern, quoted in Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 161.
53. Hermann Rausching, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), p. 185, quoted in Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 259. Regarding the last sentence, it is worth quoting here Richard Pipes's comment: “And one may add, what Bolshevism did and what it became.”
54. The formulation belongs to Walter Benjamin, who coined it in On the Concept of History. See Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 223.
55. See Nolte, La guerre civile européenne.
56. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
57. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: Norton, 1990); Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).
58. Timothy Snyder, “Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?” New York Review of Books Blog, March 10, 2011, p. 2, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/.
59. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 391.
60. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
61. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002), p. 220.
62. Erik van Ree, “Stalin as Marxist: the Western Roots of Stalin's Russification of Marxism,” in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 159-80. The model van Ree describes was the blueprint transferred onto Eastern Europe. A comparative analysis of the various forms of localizing Stalinism in the region with the type of ideology extensively described by Erik van Ree in his The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin—A Study in Twentieth-Century Patriotism (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002) could prove illuminating for cases such as Ceaușescu's Romania, Gomułka's Poland, Enver Hoxha's Albania, or Erich Honecker's GDR. For an example, see my notion of “national-Stalinism” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 18-36.
63. Nolte, La guerre civile européenne, p. 47.
64. Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 579.
65. Ibid., p. 581.
66. Nolte, La guerre civile européenne, p. 239.
67. I am developing a point made by Denis Hollier and Betsy Wing in their article “Desperanto,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 19-31. They discuss the cases of dissident anti-Fascists (to varying degrees from one individual to the other), such as Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Ernest Hemingway, and André Malraux, and their reaction to the illogic and senselessness of the late 1930s trials in Moscow, implicitly pointing out their inevitable disenchantment and awakening (especially p. 22 and p. 26).
68. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 573.
69. Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 561-62.