We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.
—Grigory Zinoviev, Severnaya kommuna, September 19, 1918
For man, therefore, who despite a corrupted heart yet possesses a good will, there remains hope of a return to the good from which he has strayed.
—Immanuel Kant, “Concerning the Indwelling of the Evil Principle with the Good, or, on the Radical Evil in Human Nature.”
In order to massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin: kulaks are not human beings. But that is a lie. They are people! They are human beings!
—Vassily Grossman, Forever Flowing
La relation dialectique entre communisme et fascisme est au centre des tragédies du siècle.
—François Furet, “Sur l'illusion communiste”
Understanding the meanings of the twentieth century is impossible if we do not acknowledge the uniqueness of the revolutionary left and right experiments in reshaping the human condition in the name of presumably inexorable historical laws. It was during that century that, using Leszek Kołakowski's inspired term, “the Devil incarnated himself in History.” The ongoing debate on the nature and the legitimacy (or even acceptability) of comparisons (analogies) between the ideologically driven revolutionary tyrannies of the twentieth century (radical Communism, or rather, Leninism, or, as some prefer, Stalinism) on one hand and radical Fascism (or, more precisely, Nazism) on the other bear on the interpretation of ultimate political evil and its impact on the human condition.1 In brief, can one compare two ideologies (and practices) inspired by essentially different visions of human nature, progress, and democracy, without losing their differentia specifica, blurring important doctrinary but also axiological distinctions? Was the essential centrality of the concentration camp, the only “perfect society,” as Adam Michnik once put it, the horrifying common denominator between the two systems in their “highly effective” stage? (Zygmunt Bauman writes about our age as a “century of camps.”2) Was François Furet right in assuming that Communism's heredity was to be detected in the post-Enlightenment search for mass democracy, whereas Fascism symbolized the very opposite?3 Was Fascism, as Eugen Weber asserted, “a rival revolution” that saw Communism only as a “competitor for the foundation for power” (in the words of Jules Monnerot)?4
Comparisons between Communism and Fascism and between Stalinism and Nazism are both useful and necessary. My comparative endeavor focuses on the common ground of these political movements, while also recognizing their crucial differences.5 Moreover, I agree with Timothy Snyder that “the Nazi and Stalinist systems must be compared, not so much to understand the one or the other but to understand our times and ourselves.”6 Communism and Fascism forged their own versions of modernity based on programs of radical change that advocated homogenization as well as social, economic, and cultural transformation presupposing “the wholesale renovation of the body of the people.”7 They were both founded upon immanent utopias rooted in eschatological fervor. To put it differently, the ideological storms of the twentieth century were the expression of a contagious hubris of modernity. Therefore, the lessons we learn by comparing and contrasting them have a universal, almost timeless meaning for any society that wants to avoid a disastrous descent into barbarity and genocidal forms of extermination. Contemporary dilemmas of a globalized world can only benefit from examination of the disastrous fallacies of the past.