The Devil in History

revolution triumphed.”²⁴ A strikingly similar statement can be found in Nazi chef propagandist Joseph Goebbels’s early novel, Michael: A German Destiny: “What makes up the modern German is not so much cleverness and intellect as the new spirit, the willingness to become one with the people, to devote oneself and sacrifice oneself to it unstintingly.”²⁵ Indeed, the times called for the dissolution of the individual into a heroic collective built on the rubble of a modernity that was declared defunct. Either from the left or from the right, the horrors of the twentieth century came about once “modernist revitalization movements” (in the words of Roger Griffin) became full-fledged state programs of social engineering.

Stalin’s former henchman and close associate Vyacheslav Molotov’s unrepentant evaluation of the Great Terror exemplifies the new dynamic between power and morality: “Of course there were excesses, but all was permissible, to my mind, for the sake of the main objective—keeping state power!… Our mistakes, including the crude mistakes, were justified.”²⁶ Once these political movements constructed their vision of modernity on the principle of a chosen, purified community crossing the desert of history from darkness into light, there could be only one solution for those who failed to meet their inclusionary criteria: excision.²⁷ Unsurprisingly, the same Molotov explained the oppression of the families of those purged, executed, deported, or assassinated as prophylactic action: “They had to be isolated. Otherwise, they would have spread all kinds of complaints, and society would have been infected by a certain amount of demoralization.”²⁸ Similarly, in 1926, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, an official Bolshevik historian and Joseph Stalin’s confidant, justified the purges decided at the sixteenth party conference (April 1929) as a method of protecting “the cells of the party and soviet organism from ‘degeneration.’”²⁹

Such affliction-weary rhetoric about the body politic was hardly different from that employed by Himmler in his speech to SS leaders at Posen in October 1943. The Reichsfuhrer-SS described Nazi policies as extermination of “a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it.”³⁰ To paraphrase Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini, both Fascism and Communism decided they had found the key to happiness, virtue, and infallibility, and were prepared to kill in applying it to specific societies.

THE ENIGMA OF TOTALITARIANISM

Herein lies the essence and mystery of the totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century: “The complete rejection of all barriers and all restraints that politics, civilization, morality, religion, natural feelings of compassion, and universal ideas of fraternity have constructed in order to moderate, repress, or sublimate the human potential for individual and collective violence.”³¹ The real similarities between the Communist and Fascist experiments (the crucial role of the party, the preeminence of ideology, the ubiquitous secret police, the fascination with technology, the frenzied cult of the “New Man,” the quasi-religious celebration of the charismatic leader) should not blur significant distinctions (one being the absence of Nazi show trials or intraparty permanent purges). Nevertheless, historian Eugen Weber judiciously remarked that “the distinction between fascism and communism is relative rather than absolute, dynamic rather than fundamental.” Under the circumstances, one cannot help but ask the same question as Weber: “Isn’t this fundamental similarity between totalitarian creeds and systems at least as important as their differences of view?”³² This book engages in a dialogue with the most influential contributions to these morally and politically urgent questions. The twentieth century was plagued by agonizing ideological polarizations whose effects continue to haunt our times.

I agree with political scientist Pierre Hassner that despite the differences between Stalinism and Nazism, their fundamental and defining common characteristic was their genocidal frenzy. Or, to use Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer’s formulation, “The phenomenon of the gulag as a manifestation of Soviet state violence and the Holocaust as the central site of Nazi terror conveys the unmistakable message that the two regimes were bent on genocide [my italics].”³³ On the one hand, both Stalinism and Nazism looked for “objective enemies” and operated with notions of collective, even genetic guilt. Obviously, the Bolshevik vision stigmatized political “sins,” whereas the Nazi Weltanschauung reified biological distinctions. In his enormously significant toast of November 7, 1937, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, as recorded by the Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov and in his diary, a speech meant to be known only by the top party and People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) elite, Stalin said, “Whoever attempts to destroy the unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities—that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the peoples of the USSR. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts,—yes, his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin! (Approving exclamations: To the great Stalin!)”³⁴

At the same, the party apparatus never played as powerful a role in Nazi Germany as it did in Stalin’s Russia. In fact, Hitler envied Stalin for having been able to place political officers as ideological watchdogs in the army. Historian Ian Kershaw stresses the fact that even when Martin Bormann took over the party leadership in May 1941, thus bringing “the Nazi Party’s interference and scope for intervention in shaping the direction of policy to a new plane,” the internal contradictions and incoherencies of the National Socialist state remained.³⁵ The Nazi Party (NSDAP) never enjoyed the same charismatic status that the Bolshevik vanguard had acquired. In Hitler’s Germany, loyalty belonged to the Fuhrer as the embodiment of the pristine volkisch community. In Stalin’s Russia, the zealots’ allegiances went to the leader to the extent that they saw him as the incarnation of the party’s wisdom.

When he maintained that the cadres decided everything, Stalin really meant it (with him being the ultimate arbiter of promotions and emotions): “A great deal is said about great leaders. But a cause is never won unless the right conditions exist. And the main thing here is the middle cadres…. They are the ones who choose the leader, explain our positions to the masses, and ensure the success of our cause. They don’t try to climb above their station; you don’t even notice them…. Generals can do nothing without an officer corps.”³⁶

STALIN, HITLER, AND THE APOTHEOSIS OF TERROR

This indeed is a crucial distinction between Stalin and Hitler. Stalin for most of his rule was successful in finding a synthesis between government and ideology, system-building and ideological expansion. His politics of mobilization, however destructive for the Soviet population, did not obliterate the formal mechanisms of state administration. In Germany by contrast, “Hitler was at one and the same time the absolutely indispensable fulcrum of the entire regime, and yet largely detached from any formal machinery of government.” In this context, the institutions of the Nazi state were transformed into “a panoply of overlapping and competing agencies dependent in differing ways upon the ‘will of the Fuhrer.’”³⁷ In the Soviet Union, Stalin successfully managed to etatize the Leninist utopia—what he called “building socialism in one country.” In Germany, governmental disorder became an inescapable facet of the Nazi polity’s cumulative radicalization. This difference between Stalinism and Nazism lies at the basis of Timothy Snyder’s explanation for Stalin’s inability to instrumentalize a new wave of terror against the Jews in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Soviet leader “found himself threatening security chiefs, rather than instructing them…. They [his subordinates] were constantly hindered by a certain attention to bureaucratic property and even, in some measure, to law.”³⁸ According to political scientist Kenneth Jowitt, Leninism, understood as an organizational mode, was constructed upon the core idea of the “impersonally charismatic” party. Stalin, despite his development of the original model and his absolutism, simply could not bring another Great Terror upon a party that had just vindicated its historical messianism in what came to be called the Great Patriotic War for the Defense of the Motherland. Either the party, with its extraordinary organizational skills, was the main hero of the victory over the Nazi aggressors or it was a shelter of vicious