1. Here I take issue with those interpretations that regard Marxism as an ideological counterpart to different versions of Fascism. Whereas Marxism is doubtless a revolutionary theory, a critique of liberal-bourgeois modernity, its main thrust is related to the democratic heritage of the Enlightenment (a point also made by Shlomo Avineri). Fascism, by contrast, rejected liberal individualism and democracy without any claim to fulfilling these “mediocre” projects. There is therefore no way to invoke a “betrayed” Fascist original doctrine and therefore no possibility to think of “another Nazism” or “dissident, humanist Fascism.” For the line of thought I take issue with, see A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). In a similar vein, Gorbachev's former chief ideologue, Alexander Yakovlev, found the seeds of totalitarian terror, especially the war against the peasantry, in the Communist Manifesto. In my view (and here I follow Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker), the continuity between Marx and Lenin was fundamental. Fascism, and especially Nazism, did not find its origin in a distorted interpretation of the democratic search for emancipation.
It is important to acknowledge that Lenin had a less fanatical perspective on this issue, discarding calls for the total destruction of the bourgeoisie and admitting the need to recruit members of the former capitalist class into the construction of the new order. See George Legget, The Cheka: Lenin's Secret Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 115. Ernst Nolte invoked Zinoviev's exterminist statement, made at the beginning of “Red Terror,” as a main argument for his historical precedence, “Schreckbild” theory of Nazism as a “counter-faith” opposed to Bolshevism. See Ernst Nolte, La guerre civile europeenne, 1917-1945 : National-socialisme et bolschévisme (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000), pp. 24 and 90. For the precedence approach, see also Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): “Like the French Jacobin, Lenin sought to build a world inhabited exclusively by ‘good citizens.' … Lenin habitually described those whom he chose to designate as his regime's ‘class enemies' in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of pest control, calling kulaks ‘bloodsuckers,' ‘spiders,' and leeches.' As early as January 1918 he used inflammatory language to incite the population to carry out pogroms ‘over the rich, swindlers, and parasites. Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, of success and the attainment of the single objective: the cleansing of Russia's soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.' Hitler would follow this example in regard to the leaders of German Social democracy, whom he thought of mainly as Jews, calling them in Mein Kampf ‘Ungeziefer,' or ‘vermin,' fit only for extermination” (Pipes, pp. 790-91). On the issue of radical evil (das radikal Böse) and totalitarianism, see Hannah Arendt's discussion in the Origins, and also Jorge Semprun, L'écriture et la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 174-75: “A Buchenwald, les S.S., les Kapo, les mouchards, les tortionnaires sadiques, faisaient tout autant partie de l'espèce humaine que les meilleurs, les plus purs d'entre nous, d'entre les victims…. La frontière du Mal n'est pas celle de l'inhumain, c'est tout autre chose. D'où la necessité d'une éthique qui transcende ce fonds originaire ù s'enracine autant la liberté du Bien que celle du Mal … [At Buchenwald, the SS, the Kapos, the informers, the sadistic tortures were as much part of the human species as the best and the purest among us, from the victims. It follows from this premise the necessity of an ethics that transcends this original background in which are rooted both the liberty of Good and the one of Evil].”
2. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 192-206. On the concentration camps as the essence of both Communist and Nazi systems in their radical stages, see Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univesity Press, 1999), especially Istvan Deak's unequivocal foreword.
3. “Que fascisme et communisme ne souffrent pas d'un discrédit comparable s'explique d'abord par le caractère respectif des deux idéologies, qui s'opposent comme le particulier à l'universel. Annonciateur de la domination des forts, le fasciste vaincu ne donne plus à voir que ses crimes. Prophète de l'émancipation des hommes, le communiste bénéficie jusque dans sa faillite politique et morale de la douceur de ses intentions.” See François Furet's letter to Ernst Nolte, in “Sur le fascisme, le communisme et l'histoire du XXe siècle,” Commentaire 80 (Winter 1997-98): 804.
4. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 24-29. See also Jules Monnerot, Sociology and Psychology of Communism, trans. Jane Degras and Richard Rees (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953).
5. For a similar position on the Stalinism-Nazism comparison, see 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. 5.
6. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 380.
7. Peter Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996): p. 14.
8. George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 225-37.
9. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 36 and xi.
10. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) p. 554-55.
11. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 422.
12. Nolte elaborated his main theses in a controversial book published in German in 1997 that came out in French translation with a preface by Stéphane Courtois, La guerre civile européenne, 1917-1945: National-socialisme et bolchevisme (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000).
13. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 9-10.
14. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, trans. Jean Steinberg with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1970), p. 9.
15. Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 341.
16. Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalin's Russia in Nazi Germany—Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 412. The two authors discuss this communality and shared experiences of Germany and Russia/USSR, but they insist that “there is no Berlin-Moscow connection without Rome, and no Russia-German discourse without Italian fascism. These were the sites of synchronized historical experience of an entire epoch [Synchronisierung von Epochenerfahrung]” (p. 421).
17. Deitrich Beyrau, “Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in “Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945,” special issue, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 426.
18. Raymond Aron quoted in Pierre Rigoulot and Ilios Yannakakis, Un pavé dans l'histoire: Le débat francais sur Le Livre Noir du communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), pp. 96-97.
19. On July 24, 1943, the Fascist Grand Council met for the first time since the beginning of the war. Its members voted 19-7 to request the king seek a policy more likely to save Italy from destruction. As Mussolini went to meet with the king, the Grand Council informed II Duce that Marshal Badoglio had been nominated prime minster and had the dictator arrested. Mussolini would later be freed by German paratroopers, but the ability of the supreme body of the National Fascist Party to depose Il Duce was in sharp contrast with the Nazi Party's inability to get rid of Hitler, to overcome the Führer principle. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), pp. 593-99.
20. See the chapter “Losing All the Wars” in R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
21. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 181.
22. Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p. xxxvii.
23. Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 173
24. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 350.
25. Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth,' p. 257.
26. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 132-36.
27. Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger Publishers, 2003), p. 138.
28. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy, p. 421.
29. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), pp. 156-57.
30. Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin—a Study in Twentieth-Century Patriotism (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002), pp. 160-62.
31. Gentile quotes the fascist catechism of 1939: “The DUCE, Benito Mussolini, is the creator of Fascism, the renewer of civil society, the Leader of the Italian people, the founder of the Empire.” In Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, pp. 137-38.
32. Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen, “The Political (Dis)Orders of Stalinism and National Socialism,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 85.
33. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 4.
34. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy, p. 506. In the first broadcast after his return to Italy (September 18, 1943), Mussolini announced that the new state would be “Fascist in a way that takes us back to our origins.”
35. Quoted in Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 56.
36. Norman Naimark, “Stalin and the Question of Genocide,” in Political Violence: Belief, Behavior, and Legitimation, ed. Paul Hollander (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 47; Norman Naimark, Stalin's Genocides (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
37. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
38. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, pp. 261 and 224.
39. Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction: Legacies of Antifascism,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 14. Besides the articles from the special issue of the New German Critique that I quoted in this section, two others bring forth excellent insight about the anti-Fascism of Weimer Germany and of postwar Italy: Antonia Grunenberg, “Dichotomous Political Thought in Germany before 1933,” and Leonardo Paggi, “Antifascism and the Reshaping of Democratic Consensus in Post-1945 Italy,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996).
40. Dan Diner and Christian Gundermann, “On the Ideology of Antifascism,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 123-32.
41. Geoff Eley, “Legacies of Antifascism: Constructing Democracy in Postwar Europe,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 75 and 81.
42. For an illuminating study on this topic, see Ekaterina Nikova, “Bulgarian Stalinism Revisited,” in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2009).
43. Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 38-42.
44. Kołakowski, Main Currents, p. 885. For the latest account of the “philosophy debate” and of the post-1945 ideological offensive against science in the USSR, see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). For Zhdanovism (its origins, nature, and impact), see Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004). Boterbloem shows how the cultural wars of 1946-48 were “dress rehearsed” as early as 1940 (pp. 210-13). Between 1945 and 1947, there was no attempt by Stalin to liberalize or reform the regime (despite the populace's expectations and signals along these lines within the Politburo). On the contrary, during those years there was continuity with the prewar situation and a noticeable radicalization by means of the reignition of the politics of purge. See Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953 (New York: Praeger, 1996); and Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
45. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 436-37; and Richard Overy's review of this book, “A World Built on Slavery,” Daily Telegraph, May 20, 2003.
46. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 328.
47. For a telling account of the paradoxes and pitfalls of the European anti-Fascist Left in the aftermath of the Second World War, see Simone de Beauvoir's novel The Mandarins (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
48. Quoted in Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 232.
49. Michael Burleigh called this practice an act of indulging in “vicarious utopianism.”
50. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1992), p. 75.
51. Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction,” p. 17. I do agree with Henri Rousso's rebuke of those who consider that anti-Fascism has run its historical course and argue that it is not relevant for the analysis of recent history. The absence of an identifiable adversary does not preclude the danger of totalitarian repeat or seduction. Having anti-Fascism and anti-Communism as inherent facets of European culture is crucial in learning from and avoiding the last century's ideological hubris. Rousso argues that “[to the position] that antifascism continues to prosper despite the fact that its target disappeared more than a half century ago, we could reply that anti-communism finds itself in an identical situation today, for while there is no real adversary, there is nevertheless a temptation to create one out of whole cloth.” Henry Rousso, “Introduction: The Legitimacy of an Empirical Comparison,” in Stalinism and Nazism, p. 5.
52. See Marcel Gauchet, A l'épreuve des totalitarismes (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
53. Martin Malia, “Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity,” in Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Mark Kramer, trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. xvii. Courtois and several collaborators put together a follow-up to the Livre Noir, Du passé nous faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire du communisme en Europe (Paris: Laffont, 2002).
54. For an insightful approach to ideological despotisms, see Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994). I examined the relationship between ideology and terror in Leninist regimes in my book The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Daniel Chirot's review essay on The Black Book can be found in East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 3 (Fall 2000).
55. V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), p. 11.
56. Vyshinsky quoted in Stéphane Courtois, in “Crimes, Terror, Repression,” his conclusion to The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 750.
57. For this argument and Arendt's quote, see Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (1997): 338.
58. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
59. Andrei Oisteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006).
60. E. A. Rees Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin Revolutionary Machiavellism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 99.
61. Fyodor Dostoyevski, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, intro. Joseph Frank (New York: Knopf, 2000). One of the characters in the novel became the symbol of a mentality often referred to as shigalyovshchina, described by noted Dostoyevsky scholar Joseph Frank as “social-political demagogy and posturing with a tendency to propose extreme measures and total solutions” (p. 727). Needless to add, for many critics of Bolshevism, Lenin was an emblematic exponent of this mindset.
62. E. A. Rees, Political Thought, p. 132.
63. Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics,” p. 52.
64. Michael Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” New Republic, December 20, 1999, p. 41.
65. I am responding here to some observations made by Hiroaki Kuromiya in his review article “Communism and Terror,” Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 1 (January 2001): 191-201. I consider that his conclusion that “the issue of terror will remain important, it will no doubt be studied merely as part (if a central part) of a larger episode in world history” needs one caveat. Communism is indeed part of a larger framework in world history, that of the ascendance of radical evil, in our times as man fell victim to statolatry (Luigi Sturzo), when the ends superseded any considerations about the means, when human beings became superfluous. Communism did generate consequences not produced by any other revolution or terror, besides the Fascist one. This is a point consistently overlooked in other reactions to the Black Book, such as Ronald Grigor Suny, “Obituary or Autopsy? Historians Look at Russia/USSR in the Short Twentieth Century,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 303-19; or Ronald Aronson, “Communism's Posthumous Trial,” History and Theory 42, no. 2 (May 2003): 222-45. One can try and situate in the same category the genocide in Rwanda and that in Ukraine (as Aronson does), just for the sake of a Manichean capitalism versus Communism polarity, but it is hardly knowledge-productive. One can argue about terror as an epiphenomenon of specific historical circumstances (civil war, famine, capitalist offensive, etc., as Suny does), but the criminal nature of the Soviet regime lay bare from its inception (e.g., in the RFSR 1918 Constitution).
66. Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell,” New York Times, December 22, 1997, A27.
67. See Rigoulot and Yannakakis, Un pavé dans l'histoire.
68. Personal conversation with Annette Wieworka, Washington, D.C., November 13, 2010. I also discussed extensively these issues with Stephane Courtois at the Sighet, Romania, Summer School on the “Memory of Communism,” June 2009.
69. Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 402 and 406.
70. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 462.
71. Christopher R. Browning and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Frameworks for Social Engineering. Stalinist Schema of Identification and the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 262.
72. Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key: The Communist Case of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 175.
73. See Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell.” Amir Weiner also makes an excellent point on this issue: “When Stalin's successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death [concentration] camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution.” See Amir Weiner's review of the Black Book of Communism in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 450-52.
74. Ian Kershaw, “Reflections on Genocide and Modernity,” in In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 381-82.
75. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 470.
76. Stéphane Courtois, “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” in The Black Book, p. 23.
77. Jeffrey Herf, “Unjustifiable Means,” Washington Post, January 23, 2000, pp. X09. Herf, however, adds an important caveat to his argument (one stressed by other scholars discussing the Black Book): the crimes of Communism were a constant focus of scholarship and of official discourse during the Cold War, while the Holocaust intensively preoccupied academia and the public only starting in the 1970s.
78. Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” p. 41.
79. “Vilnius declaration of the OSCE parliamentary assembly and resolutions adopted at the eighteenth annual session” (Vilnius, June 29 to July 3, 2009), http://www.oscepa.org/images/stories/documents/activities/1.Annual%20Session/2009_Vilnius/Final_Vilnius_Declaration_ENG.pdf. The Prague Declaration and the OSCE Resolution are hardly singular. Other official, pan-European or trans-Atlantic documents have been made to condemn the criminality of Communism and Stalinism following the example of the criminalization of Fascism and Nazism, for example, the EU Parliament resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism or the building of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. This monument was dedicated by President George W. Bush on Tuesday, June 12, 2007. June 12 was chosen because it was the twentieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's famous Brandenburg Gate speech. See http://www.globalmuseumoncommunism.org/voc.
80. Quoted in Carolyn J. Dean, “Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and ‘Exorbitant' Jewish Memory,” History and Memory 18, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2006): 43-85. Though I disagree with Carolyn Dean's conclusions regarding authors such as Furet, Courtois, Besançon, and Todorov, I think her detailed presentation of the French debate on “which is more evil, Communism or Nazism” shows the intrinsic fallacy of such an argumentation: it is a dead end knowledge-wise, for any resolution on the topic will always be partisan.
81. Ibid., p. 73.
82. For recent analysis of the fate of the Black Book of Nazi Crimes against the Soviet Jews, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
83. Igal Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 6.
84. Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, “State Violence—Violent Societies,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 213.
85. Eric D. Weitz, “On Certainties and Ambivalences: Reply to My Critics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 63. See the other contributions to the debate stirred by Weitz's initial article: Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1-29. He received replies from Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 30-43; Amir Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 44-53; and Alaina Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept'? Race as Discursive Practice,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 54-61. Peter Fritzsche offered, later on, interesting responses to Weitz's approach in “Genocide and Global Discourse,” German History 23, no. 1 (2005): 96-111.
86. Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution, p. 5.
87. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship, More or Less Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 487-528; and Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). Alexopoulos's research leads us to a conclusion similar to Jowitt's: “The practice of giving and taking rights for political purposes produced a highly fragmented society where individuals experienced different and unstable states of civic belonging” (p. 490). Similarly, Jowitt argued that “the critical issue facing Leninist regimes was citizenship. The political individuation of an article potential citizenry treated contemptuously by an inclusive (not democratic), neotraditional (not modernized) Leninist polity was the cause of Leninist breakdown.” Ken Jowitt, “Weber, Trotsky and Holmes on the Study of Leninist Regimes,” Journal of International Affairs (2001): 44.
88. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship,” p. 521. It should be noted here that Alexopoulos makes this statement in agreement with Weitz's racialization thesis.
89. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provides the following definition: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
90. Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 17.
91. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 281-302.
92. Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key,” p. 175.
93. Both quotations are from David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 397-98 and 388.
94. For the role of excision in Soviet population politics, see Amir Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1114-55.
95. Andre Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
96. Michael Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” p. 41.
97. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 332-33. See also Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (London: New Press, 2003), pp. 136 and 144.
98. Nicolas Werth, “Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henry 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), p. 90. As pointed out by Werth, Overy, Martin, and Applebaum, legal decisions such as Article 58-10 of the Soviet Penal Code, the State Theft Law of 1947, the 1933 instructions adding to the existent 1924 resolution of the TsIK regarding sotsvredbye (socially harmful) elements, NKVD Decrees 00447 and 00485, etc., generated an ever-widening array of criteria for criminalizing larger and larger sections of Soviet society.
99. Both quotes come from Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe's Edge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), p. 185. For his discussion of the role of forced labor under Soviet Communism, see pp. 191-93.
100. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 595.
101. Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1943-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.
102. For discussions about “Soviet subjectivity,” see Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key” and Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” in Language and Revolution, ed. Igor Halfin, pp. 114-35. See also Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 71-96; and Igal Halfin, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 34-40. For a critique of this approach, see Aleksandr Ėtkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 171-86.
103. Quoted in David Priestland, Stalinism and The Politics of Mobilization, p. 293.
104. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, p. 94.
105. For this point, see Richard Overy, The Dictators, p. 633.
106. Igal Halfin, “Introduction,” p. 14.
107. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 116.
108. Dan Diner, Cataclysms, pp. 192-93. A side comment to this discussion could be a reminder that in a Communist system the meaning and significance of forced labor should be explained starting from Marxian terminology. According to Marx, labor was “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities which a human being exercises whenever he produces.” Robert C. Tucker, ed.,The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton), p. 309. Therefore, forced labor in the gulag represented a method of exhausting individuals, of absolute takeover of the self. The zeks were spent human beings. This is maybe one of the crucial lessons offered by authors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nadejda Mandelstam, and Varlam Shalamov. For the liminal nature of gulag experience, what German philosopher Karl Jaspers defined as Grenzsituationen (limit-situations), and the impossibility of communicating it, see the chapters “Return” and “Memory,” in Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 535-656.
109. After 1945, the gulag increasingly merged with the civilian economy, which was being transformed into “a vast industrial empire” (in the words of Figes). It also became more and more unmanageable, and the consequences of “the culture of the champs” deepened its “contamination” potential. Upon Stalin's death, but also before it, the gulag was seriously shaken by large uprisings such as that of Norilsk. For a short history of the latter, see Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 529-34.
110. Overy, The Dictators, p. 643.
111. Werth, “Stalin's System during the 1930s,” in Stalinism and Nazism, ed. Henri Rousso, pp. 74-75. In this contribution Werth identifies four interrelated types of violence in Stalin: “The first arose out of the paranoia of a dictator constructing his own cult against ‘comrades in arms'; … terror directed at Party or economic cadres; … virtual criminalization of the daily behavior or ‘ordinary' citizens; … violence exercised against a number of non-Russian ethic groups.” This rule of arbitrariness for the sake of the etatization of Utopia is best summarized by Dan Diner in the following statement: “In the heyday of Stalinism, despotism and fear were the elixir of rule.” Diner, Cataclysms, p. 191.
112. Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality” New York Review of Books 56, no. 12, July 16, 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875.
113. Ibid.
114. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 406.
115. Peter Fritzsche, “On Being the Subjects of History: Nazis as Twentieth-Century Revolutionaries,” in Language and Revolution, ed. Igal Halfin, p. 151.
116. Norman Naimark, “Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide,” Telos 136, (Fall 2006): 14. In his piece, Naimark underlines the fact that the author of the concept, Raphael Lemkin, “was convinced that the international community should mount a legal initiative against states that attacked peoples, religious groups, racial minorities, and outlier political groups” (p. 15). Moreover, “all of the early drafts of the Genocide Convention, including the initial U.N. Secretariat draft of May 1947, included political groups in their definition. The Soviets, Poles, and even some non-communist members of the committees and drafting commissions objected” (p. 17).
117. Dan Diner, Cataclysms, p. 90.
118. Souvarine (sometimes spelled Suvarin), quoted in The Black Book, 296.
119. See his profound book Le malheur du siècle: Sur le communisme, le nazisme et l'unicité de la Shoah (Paris: Fayard, 1998).
120. Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 287.
121. I am paraphrasing Bartov. He gives a commendable portrait of the dogmatic mind: “One had to lie blatantly and consistently to oneself and one's society to make Bolshevism palatable.” Ibid., p. 286.
122. Dan Diner, “Remembrance and Knowledge: Nationalism and Stalinism in Comparative Discourse,” in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 86-87.
123. For an excellent discussion on the differences between the gulag and the Holocaust and the process by which the latter's memory has been sacralized, see Gabriel Motzkin, “The Memory of Crime and the Formation of Identity,” in The Lesser Evil, ed. Dubiel and Motzkin.
124. Helmut Dubiel, “The Remembrance of the Holocaust as a Catalyst for a Transnational Ethnic?” in “Taboo, Trauma, Holocaust,” special issue, New German Critique 90 (Autumn 2003): 59-70.
125. See Krzystof Pomian, “Communisme et nazisme: Les tragédies du siecle,” L'Histoire (July-August 1998): 100-105. For a similar view, see Michael Scammel's review of The Black Book. In his review, Scammell notices that, in the American edition, some chapters lack bibliographies. In fact, at least in the case of the chapter dealing with Central and South-East Europe, authored by Karel Bartosek, the French edition included a list of further readings that was strangely deleted from the American translation. Indeed, one of my own books published in Romanian in 1996 was mentioned in Bartosek's bibliography (Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej, Bucharest, 1995).
126. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). He defines comparative trivialization thus: “At its heart lies the device of acknowledging Nazi atrocities but, as it were, ‘humanizing' them by pointing, indignantly, at crimes committed by others—crimes presumably as vicious as those perpetrated in the Third Reich … its historical function is to cover the special horror of German barbarity between 1933 and 1945, and to divert attention from studying barbarity in its own—that is to say, its German context” (pp. xi-xiv).
127. Quoted by Stéphane Courtois in his conclusion to The Black Book, p. 751.
128. I don't share philosopher Avishai Margalit's view that the ideological premises of Communism, universalistic and humanist at least in the Marxism texts, would make the application of the radical evil concept inaccurate. But Margalit's analysis of the differences between opportunistic and principled compromises remains illuminatingly useful. See his book On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
129. Alain Besançon, “Mémoire et oubli du communisme,” Commentaire, no. 80 (Winter 1997-98): 789-93. The essay was translated as “Forgotten Communism” in the American journal Commentary 105, no. 1 (January 1998): 24-27.
130. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 295.
131. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 2-3.
132. Martin Malia, “Foreword,” in The Black Book, ed. Stéphane Courtois, p. xx.
133. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship—Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000), pp. 36-38.
134. Lawrence Olivier, Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 33, no. 2 (June 2000): p. 399.
135. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Obituary or Autopsy?” p. 319.
136. Igal Halfin lists the categories defined by Chapter 13 of the Declaration: “(1) The so-called former people (byvshie liudi)—primarily religious functionaries and employees of the tsarist police and military; (2) class aliens—landowners, individuals who lived off unearned income, exploiters, private trades; (3) administrative exiles and individuals who had their rights suspended by a court; (4) individuals economically dependent on the previously listed; and (5) the mentally ill.” It is not difficult to see how these categories could balloon to the dimensions of an out-out war against society, as discussed above. See Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Of course, Suny could argue that this document falls in line with the principle that “some omelets that are worth broken eggs, but, as anyone making breakfast knows, first one should make sure that all the ingredients are available and remember that eggs must be broken delicately, not smashed so that yokes, whites, and shells all get cooked together” (“Obituary,” p. 318).
137. Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell,” p. A27.
138. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 295.
139. 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): p. 52.
140. In my view, the best analysis of the intellectual origins and transmogrifications of Communism and Fascism remains Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution: Ideological Polarizations in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction, 1991), with a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz (originally published by the University of California Press in 1981).
141. Evans, The Coming, p. 324.
142. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 220 and 240.
143. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 65.
144. The Black Book, p. 755.
145. See Weber, “Revolution?” p. 43.