1. Here we may remember the two epigraphs Raymond Aron chose for L'opium des intellectuels, his 1955 devastating demystification of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist dialectics. He quoted Marx: “Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by misfortune, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Then, as a counterpunctual response, he used a quote from Simone Weil: “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people.” See Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, intro. Harvey C. Mansfield (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), p. vii. See also Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
2. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. xv.
3. See David Ingersoll, Richard Mathews, and Andrew Davison, The Philosophical Roots of Modern Ideology: Liberalism, Conservatism, Marxism, Fascism, Nazism, Islamism (Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sloan/Prentice Hall, 2010).
4. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 397.
5. Ibid., p. 455.
6. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York and Wildwood House: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 46.
7. Ibid., p. 301. Leon Trotsky uttered similar statements during and after the October Revolution. See Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, A Reply to Karl Kautsky, with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2007).
8. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), p. 48.
9. See Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
10. See chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 491-99.
11. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1959), pp. 385-86.
12. See Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, The Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 934-62.
13. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 23. Weber applies a memorable formula for this project of modern revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.”
14. Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, intro. Tony Judt (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 203.
15. For ongoing efforts to return to an alleged pristine Leninism, see Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, Slavoj Žižek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
16. Waldemar Gurian, quoted in Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (2002): 3.
17. See Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), p. 116.
18. See, in this respect, Bertram Wolfe, “Leninism,” in Marxism in the Modern World, ed. Milorad M. Drachkovitch (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 47-89.
19. See Michael Charlton, Footsteps from the Finland Station: Five Landmarks in the Collapse of Communism (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 1992); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009).
20. See Walicki, Marxism, pp. 269-397.
21. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986).
22. Lefort quoted in Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 293.
23. See my Fantasies of Salvation: Nationalism, Democracy, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
24. Harry Kreisler, “The Individual, Charisma, and the Leninist Extinction,” in A Conversation with Ken Jowitt (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 2000).
25. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 49.
26. See the quotations on Lenin and terror in Kostas Papaioannou's excellent anthology Marx et les marxistes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 314.
27. See Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1st ed., trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Bantam Books, 1968 (1941]); John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 21-96; Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009).
28. Darkness at Noon came out in French, to huge public success, during the early Cold War years, under the title Le zero et l'infini.
29. Sergey Nechaev, The Revolutionary Catechism, in The Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, by Franco Venturi, intro. Isaiah Berlin (New York: Knopf, 1960), pp. 365-66. See also James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980); and Semen (Semyon) Frank, “The Ethic of Nihilism: A Characterization of the Russian Intelligentsia's Moral Outlook,” in Nikolai Berdyaev et al., Vekhi (Lanmdmarks) (Armonk, N.J.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 131-55.
30. Quoted in Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 82.
31. Piatakov quoted in Walicki, Marxism, 461.
32. Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2, no. 2 (January-March 2001): 120.
33. Ibid., 121.
34. Ibid., 123.
35. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 90.
36. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), p. 171.
37. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdeněk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, ed. George Shriver, foreword by Archie Brown and Mikhail Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
38. Jowitt, New World Disorder, 10.
39. A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 73.
40. Elena Bonner, “The Remains of Totalitarianism” New York Review of Books, March 8, 2001, 4.
41. Ibid., p. 5.
42. Alain Besançon, The Rise of the Gulag: The Intellectual Origins of Leninism (New York: Continnum, 1981); Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991); Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and French Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
43. John Maynard Keynes quoted in Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 155.
44. Burleigh, Sacred Causes, p. 76.
45. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 343-44 (subsequent references to Main Currents refer to this edition.
46. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, p. 37.
47. For the whole argument, see Erik van Ree, “Stalin's Organic Theory of the Party,” Russian Review 52, no. 1 (January 1993): 43-57.
48. Erik van Ree, “Stalin as a Marxist Philosopher,” Studies in East European Thought 52 (2000): 294.
49. Ibid., p. 271. I am also paraphrasing Isaak Steinberg's description of the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution: “All aspects of existence—social, economic, political, spiritual, moral, familial—were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands.” Steinberg was a left Socialist revolutionary, who for a brief period was the first Soviet commissar for justice but resigned in protest against Bolshevik extremist violence and in 1923 fled to Germany. After the coming to power of the Nazis, he left for London. During the war he was a central figure in the plans for relocation of the Jewish refugees. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 39.
50. For the mindset of Bolshevik-style illuminated militants, see Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Arthur Koestler's contribution in Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 15-75.
51. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York and London: Pathfinder, 1997), p. 370.
52. Ibid., p. 387.
53. Cohen, Bukharin, p. 133.
54. Ibid., p. 172.
55. Ibid., p. 269.
56. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 491.
57. Ibid., pp. 473-74.
58. Kołakowski, Main Currents, pp. 620-39.
59. See “Proletarians and Communists,” The Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, pp. 483-91.
60. See Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 211.
61. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 143.
62. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003).
63. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princet on, N.J., and Oxford: Princet on University Press, 2003), p. 165.
64. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 91-174.
65. George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: H. Fertig, 1999).
66. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 235.
67. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 130.
68. 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): 36.
69. Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London and New York: Verso, 2010). I am extending here Priestland's analysis of what he coins as “revivalist Bolshevism.” See 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. 39.
70. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, p. 55.
71. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p. 460.
72. E. A. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin: Revolutionary Machiavellism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp. 74 and 235-36.
73. T. H. Rigby, “Introduction: Political Legitimacy, Weber and Communist Mono-organisational Systems,” in Political Legitimation in Communist States, ed. T. H. Rigby and F. Feher (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), p. 5.
74. Gentile and Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics,” p. 46.
75. Mann takes his point further by identifying two subtypes within this political category: “One driven by revolutionary class ideology, exemplified by the Stalinist regime” and “the other driven by what I shall call a revolutionary ‘nation-statist' ideology, exemplified by Nazism.” Michael Mann, “Contradictions of Continuous Revolution,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 136. See his Fascists (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
76. David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 270.
77. See Boris Souvarine, Staline: Aperçu historique de bolshévisme (Paris: Éditions Champ Libre, 1977); Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000); Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004); and Yuri Felschtinsky, Lenin and His Comrades (New York: Enigma Books, 2010).
78. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, The Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 90.
79. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, p. 50.
80. Peter Ehlen, “Communist Faith and World-Explanatory Doctrine: A Philosophical analysis,” in Totalitarianism and Political Religions, vol. 2, Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, ed. Hans Maier and Michael Schäfer (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 134.
81. 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): 269.
82. Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 242.
83. Ana Krylova, “Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm: ‘Class Instinct' as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 18-19. David Priestland makes a similar point as he identifies two versions of understanding “class” by the Bolsheviks: a neotraditionalist one, “as class origin,” which allows for the entrenchment of the bureaucracy produced by mass vydvizhenie; and a revivalist one, “as class mentality and culture,” which emphasizes the notion of vospetanie, which can be turned against the “new class.” See Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization, p. 415.
84. Quoted by David McLellan, Marxism after Marx, 4th ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 98.
85. Jowitt, New World Disorder, pp. 25-27.
86. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin, p. 115.
87. Rees lists N. A. Speshnev, N. P. Ogarev, P. G. Zaichnevskii, M. Bakunin, P. N. Tkachev, and S. G. Nechaev as the founding fathers of “revolutionary Machiavellism.” On the relationship between the Russian tradition of radical political thought and Lenin, see also Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, ed. Robert Conquest (London: Fontana, 1974); and Adam Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1977).
88. Robert Mayer, “Lenin and the Jacobin Identity in Russia,” Studies in East European Thought 51 (1999): 127-54. Also see Mayer, “Lenin, the Proletariat, and the Legitimation of Dictatorship,” Journal of Political Ideologies 2 (February 1997): 99-115; and “Plekhanov, Lenin and Working-Class Consciousness,” Studies in East European Thought 49 (September 1997): 159-85.
89. See Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2007).
90. On Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, see Kołakowski, Main Currents, pp. 744-49.
91. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” p. 391.
92. Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kern (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich), p. 134.
93. Daniel Chirot, “What Was Communism All About?” (review essay on The Black Book of Communism), East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 665-75.
94. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics.
95. Peter Holquist, “'Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Perspective,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 3 (1997): 415-50.
96. I am paraphrasing Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment, p. 415.
97. Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion” in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1 (June 2005): 98.
98. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York: Free Press, 1994); Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990).
99. Quoted by John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 239.
100. Ibid., p. 230.
101. Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction between the Two Revolutions,” in Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (London: Verso, 2002), 6.
102. Alexander Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); see also my review of Yakovlev's book, “Apostate Apparatchik,” Times Literary Supplement, February 21, 2003, p. 26; and Paul Hollander, The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).
103. Isaac Deutscher, “Marxism and Primitive Magic,” in The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on Twentieth Century World Politics, ed. Tariq Ali (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 11-14.
104. See Robert C. Tucker's interview with George Urban in G. R. Urban, ed., Stalinism—Its Impact on Russia and the World (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1982), pp. 151 and 170.
105. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 341.
106. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” in Stalinism—New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 20-47.
107. Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization, p. 249.
108. 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), p. 172.
109. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment, p. 231.
110. In Mussolini's Italy, Carta de Lavoro, the 1927 charter that encoded the regime's program of modernization, used a strikingly similar characterization of the community on the path to constructing the revolutionary state: “The Italian nation is an organism having a purpose, life and means of action superior to those of any individual or groups who are part of it. It is a moral, political and economic unit which integrally achieves the Fascist State.” This charter was designed mainly by Italo Balbo. See Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy, p. 227.
111. David Brandenberger, “Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and Its Construction,” in Stalin, ed. Davies and Harris, p. 250. For his discussion of National Bolshevism, see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).
112. Gill, The Origins, pp. 242-45.
113. Both quotations from Stalin are from Ethan Pollock, “Stalin as the Coryphaeus of Science: Ideology and Knowledge in the Post-War Years,” in Stalin, ed. Davies and Harris, pp. 283 and 280.
114. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 51.
115. Lenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective, compiled and with an introduction by Lennard D. Gerson, foreword by Alain Besançon (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), p. 86.
116. Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 19.
117. See Leszek Kołakowski interview in Urban, ed., Stalinism, p. 250.
118. Roger Griffin, “Introduction: God's Counterfeiters? Investigating the Triad of Fascism, Totalitarianism and (Political) Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 3 (Winter 2004): 291-325.
119. Kołakowski, Main Currents, pp. 989-1032, 1124-1147; Gorbachev's former chief ideologue, Alexander Yakovlev, writes about this in his somewhat vehement contribution to Stéphane Courtois et al., eds., Du passé nous faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire du communisme en Europe (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002), pp. 173-210.
120. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 2.
121. Tucker argues that “the Russian revolutionary mentality found no difficulty in adjusting itself to Marxism, or Marxism to itself. Part of the explanation is that this mentality was, even in pre-Marxist days, hostile to capitalism …. But the chief facilitating circumstance was … that the war between class and class had to be decided in the final analysis by overthrowing the existing state.Further, his doctrine appealed to the anarchist streak in the Russian revolutionary mentality, for it visualized the withering away of government after the proletarian revolution. Hence it was entirely possible for a Russian revolutionary whose mind was obsessed with the image of a dual Russia to become a Marxist and continue in that capacity the indigenous revolutionary tradition of warfare against official Russia…. He could talk as a Marxist while thinking and feeling as a Russian revolutionary.” Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change, rev. ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), p. 130-31.
122. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 172.
123. Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
124. Alexander Solzhenitsyn et al., From Under the Rubble, intro. Max Hayward (Washington D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1981).
125. Lars T. Lih, “How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin's What Is to Be Done?” Kriitika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 5-49.
126. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, p. 14.
127. Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Communities of Virtuosi: An Interpretation of the Stalinist Criticism and Self-Criticism in the Perspective of Max Weber's Sociology of Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 16-42.
128. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, pp. 156-57.
129. Ibid., p. 84.
130. Earnest Tuveson quoted in ibid., p. 47.
131. Ibid., p. 115.
132. There was a crucial distinction between Marx and Lenin on this issue. For Marx, the liberation of the proletariat had to be “the work of the proletarians themselves.” Two lines of thought collided on this issue, leading to some of the fiercest debates in twentieth-century left-wing radical parties and movements.
133. Maykovsky wrote these verses in his poem “Vlaadimir Ilyich Lenin” in Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moia revolutsia (Moscow: Sovremennik Publishers, 1974).
134. Bolshevism and National Socialism shared the fascination with an anthropological revolution. Mussolini was also committed to creating a new Fascist Man, and so was the Captain of Romania's Iron Guard, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.
135. Astrid Hadin, “Stalinism as a Civilization: New Perspectives on Communist Regimes,” Political Studies Review 2 (2004): 166-84.
136. For a discussion of myth versus ideology in relation to Marxism-Leninism, see Carol Barner-Barry and Cynthia Hody, “Soviet Marxism-Leninism as Mythology,” Political Psychology 15, no. 4 (December 1994): 609-30.
137. Ehlen, “Communist Faith and World-Explanatory Doctrine,” in Totalitarianism, ed. Maier and Schäfer, p. 129.
138. See A. James Gregor's discussion of the nationalist, mystical writings of Serghei Kurginian and Alexandr Prohanov and their influence over Zyuganov, particularly manifested in the “Declaration to the People,” the manifesto of Russian Stalino-Fascism. See A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 144-55; and Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).
139. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1989).
140. In addition to Jowitt's contributions, see Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind; and Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: Norton, 2000).
141. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” p. 375.
142. Beryl Williams, Lenin (Harlow: Logman Publishing Group, 1999), p. 73.
143. 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 Publishers, 1970), p. 152.
144. Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954); Burleigh, Sacred Causes, esp. “The Totalitarian Political Religions,” pp. 38-122.
145. Bert Hoppe, “Iron Revolutionaries and Salon Socialists: Bolsheviks and German Communists in the 1920s and 1930s,” 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): 509.
146. Hoffer, The True Believer.
147. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1976), p. 315.
148. For an excellent analysis of Lefort's writings, see Howard, The Specter, 71-82.
149. Claude Lefort, La complication: Retour sur le communisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
150. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), p. 285-86.
151. Lefort, La complication, p. 47.
152. Robert C. Tucker, “Lenin's Bolshevism as a Culture in the Making,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Bolshevik Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 26-27.
153. One can point to a whole intellectual tradition, and I am thinking here of authors such as Cornelius Castoriadis and, much earlier, Georgi Plekhanov, Yuli Martov, Pavel Akselrod, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Anton Pannekoek, Ruth Fischer, Boris Souvarine, Milovan Djilas, Agnes Heller, and Leszek Kołakowski.
154. Lefort, The Political Forms, p. 297.
155. Hitler quoted in Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 250.
156. Maier, “Political Religions and their Images,” p. 274.
157. Peter Holquist, “New Terrains and New Chronologies: The Interwar Period through the Lens of Population Politics,” Kirtika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 171-72.
158. Sigrid Meuschel, “The Institutional Frame: Totalitarianism, Extermination and the State,” in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (Portland, Or.: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 115-16.
159. Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 235.
160. Gorlizki and Mommsen, “The Political (Dis)Orders of Stalinism and National Socialism,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 86.
161. Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 1-2.