The Devil in History

Union, there were citizens and there were citizens.” As in Nazi Germany, citizenship rights increasingly morphed into a boundary between belonging and criminalization, between “the national self and the enemy others,” an indicator of friends and foes.⁸⁷ The principle of the elect that was at the core of the Leninist theory of the historical subject realizing utopia was reflected in citizenship laws. Those deemed unworthy to hold and exercise the rights assigned to the Soviet body politic were disenfranchised, which in the case of Communist polities equaled de facto denaturalization and statelessness. Moreover, during certain periods in the evolution of these regimes, this rightlessness became an inherited disease. Under Stalin, “the deprivation of rights extended to entire kin groups, as family units were often punished collectively. The Stalinist state viewed enemies of various kinds as defined by ties of kinship; thus entire families lost their rights as a group. Class enemies (Nepmen, traders, kulaks, lishentsy) and so-called ‘enemies of the people,’ as well as enemy nations (Germans, Poles, Koreans, Greeks, Chinese)—both Soviet citizens and foreign subjects—were rounded up as kin groups. The disloyalty of the fathers was thought to be passed down to the sons. Both rightlessness and statelessness became inherited traits.”⁸⁸

If one associates such findings with analyses of the camps’ population profile or with the nature of terror and victims of mass violence under Communist regimes (such as those provided by the authors of The Black Book), then the notion of “class genocide” advanced by Stephane Courtois (Dan Diner uses the term sociocide) gains considerable weight. The victimization, imprisonment, and even execution of “kin groupings” based on a blanket, inheritable identity exclusively and commonly applied to all its members comes asymptotically close to the type of violence presupposed by the concept of genocide, as it is internationally defined.⁸⁹ At times in the history of almost all Communist regimes (what Stephen Kotkin called “re-revolutionizing the revolution”),⁹⁰ there are distinct stretches of perpetrating genocide against their subject populations. The crucial difference from Nazism, however, is that these practices were built into the system by consequence.⁹¹ Even if one agrees with Halfin that “because guilt in the Soviet Union was always a personal concept, the victim died not as an anonymous number but as a concrete individual convicted for specific actions,”⁹² deterministic victimhood did become a state norm under Communism. Even the internal debates within the Bolshevik party ruling circles testify to this point.

In 1945, chief ideologue Andrei Zhdanov criticized automatic purges based on class origin: “The ‘biological’ approach to people is very widespread among us, when the existence of some not entirely ‘convenient’ relatives or other, frequently long dead, is made a criterion of the political loyalty of a worker. Such ‘biologists,’ producing their distinctive theory of ‘inheritance,’ try to look at living communists through a magnifying glass.” Even Stalin, in the statement signaling his retreat from the Great Terror, admitted in 1938 the practice of indiscriminate mass purges (which at the time had harrowing consequences for those subjected to them): “It is time to understand that Bolshevik vigilance consists in essence in the ability to unmask the enemy regardless of how clever and cunning he may be, irrespective of how he adorns himself, and not in indiscriminate or ‘on the off-chance’ expulsions [from the party], by the tens and hundreds, of everyone who comes within reach.”⁹³ The very notion of revolutionary vigilance treaded a thin line between exclusion and physical elimination. At the point of the radicalization of revolutionary utopia in action, the obsession of Lenin and Stalin (and for that matter other Communist dictators) with cleaning and purifying the “human garden,” Communism’s focus on excision, transmogrified into extermination.⁹⁴

ARGUMENTS FOR COMPARISONS

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.

Francois 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 and inclusiveness. 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