The Devil in History

response to Bolshevism, a panic-ridden reaction to an external cause (as suggested by German historian Ernst Nolte).⁵⁵ The ideological roots of Hitler’s politics were endogenous. There was a proto-Fascist tradition in Germany as well as in France.⁵⁶ Still, at a certain moment, Stalinism incorporated the motifs and symbols of the ultranationalist Right and became, as Alexander Yakovlev and Robert C. Tucker have argued, “Bolshevism of the extreme right.”⁵⁷ Timothy Snyder judiciously underlined that “the special quality of Nazi racism is not diluted by the historical observation that Stalin’s motivations were sometimes national or ethnic. The pool of evil simply grows deeper [my emphasis].”⁵⁸

Indeed, both Hitler and Stalin spoke of ethnic cleansing. For example, between 1937 and 1938, most of the victims of the Great Terror were either class or national enemies. However, a nuance emphasized by Snyder offers a caveat to the comparison between these two extremisms. In fact, Stalinism did not transform mass murder into political history, as happened in Nazi Germany. For Stalin, “mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism.”⁵⁹ But, to take Snyder’s point further, Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly founded its alternative, illiberal modernity upon extermination. The Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered.

Communism’s appetite for ethnic cleansing, on top of “sociocide” (to use Dan Diner’s term), was not rooted simply within Stalin’s phobias and idiosyncrasies. Zhdanovism (the anticosmopolitan campaigns after 1946), the secret pogrom of the early 1950s, and the Slansky affair were part and parcel of the (il)logic of mature Stalinism.⁶⁰ Ironically, they represented a victory of sorts by Nazism over its main ideological rival. As Martin Amis points out, the anti-Jewish terror planned by Stalin “would have modeled itself on the older Bolshevik idea or tactic of inciting one class to destroy another. It would have resembled the Red Terror of 1918 with the Jews very approximately in the role of the bourgeoisie.”⁶¹ Erik van Ree correctly emphasized that the real ideological originality of mature Stalinism was the synthesis between nation and class and between two main goals, national development and world Communism.⁶² The process of state-building in the Soviet Union produced very un-Marxist results. Instead of withering away, the bureaucratic Leviathan, abysmally corrupt and incurably inefficient, reached astronomic dimensions. Or, following the analyses of Ken Jowitt and Terry Martin, Stalinism talked about modernization but practiced neotraditionalism.

In short, it is no longer possible to maintain and defend the image of a relatively benign Lenin whose ideas were viciously distorted by the sociopath Stalin. Ideological obsession was the crucial element that determined the decisions of totalitarian leaders. They lived off ideology, in ideology, for ideology. The Bolshevik and Nazi messianic sects were tightly knit ideological constructions. The closest analogy, which I owe to Ken Jowitt, would be the fortress, the hermetically isolated castle whose inhabitants think and act alike. In spite of other questionable statements, Ernst Nolte is right when he underlines that, whereas Lenin was a Russian politician and Hitler a German one, the story was much more complicated. They were ideological prophets, and only ideology could explain the course of their historical interventions: “The fundamental question remains the exacerbation (Uberschiessen) of novelty, of the hiatus which constituted the properly ideological. It is the ideological which begets the most meaningful actions. There may exist deep differences between the ideologies, but each one is defined by this simultaneous overcoming and by a kernel of legitimate and convenient elements and only ideological extremism that can equally generate and destroy.”⁶³

Robert Gellately bluntly and unequivocally portrayed Lenin as “a heartless and ambitious individual who was self-righteous in claiming to know what was good for ‘humanity,’ brutal in his attempt to subject his own people to radical social transformation, and convinced he held the key to the eventual overthrow of global capitalism and the establishment of world Communism.”⁶⁴ It is hard not to agree with him when he writes: “Lenin introduced Soviet Communism, complete with new secret police and concentration camps…. Once in power, Lenin enthusiastically hunted down anyone who did not fit in or who opposed the new regime, and he introduced the Communist Party purges that periodically called forth nationwide witch hunts…. Lenin did not become dictator simply by taking on the mantle of chairman of Sovnarkom (in effect its premier). Rather, he made his will prevail by his control of the great Marxist texts and perhaps above all by his ferocity.”⁶⁵

Again, Ernst Nolte and Richard Pipes are not mistaken in examining the conflict between the two totalitarian states as one between similar constructions rooted in ideological frenzy and utopian hubris. After Hitler’s coming to power in January 1933, “two great ideological states faced each other in Europe, two states whose attitude, in last analysis, was determined by conceptions, which considered themselves interpretations of both past and future world history, and who used these interpretations to make sense of human life.”⁶⁶

Lenin created the praxis of voluntarism and Manichaeism necessary for the success of revolutionary action. In Lenin’s political cosmology there was no way to reconcile the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; the triumph of the former was predicated on the destruction of the latter. In the same vein, as World War II confronted the Nazis with possible defeat, Hitler and his acolytes resorted to a radical acceleration of their genocidal policies against the Jews. The idea was that no peace with the Jews could be reached, under any circumstances.

Lenin’s impact on Marxism and his responsibility for the ethical abyss and the immense human sacrifice generated by Communism in the twentieth century is, I think, superbly expressed in the following formulation from Denis Holier and Betsy Wing: “Marxism brought history out of its infant stages, out of its speechless moments, and gave it a soundtrack…. Lenin discovered that history spoke the language of dialectical materialism. But one needs an announcer to broadcast the script.” And that radio was Radio-Moscow with the single voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. To continue this argument, only when the irradiating ideological center “ceased to be decipherable for the Marxist decoders” was it possible for “the contract of silence” regarding the criminality of Bolshevism to hold sway and the emancipation from Diamat to gain traction in the intellectual and political history of Marxism in Europe.⁶⁷ Ironically, it was precisely the disenchanted return to “the great Marxist texts,” a forgotten and betrayed tradition, that allowed successive waves of revisionist de-Stalinization to rock the boat of the utopian party-state. There was no such tradition in the Nazi experience and no original, presumably humanist Holy Writ for disillusioned National Socialists to dream of resurrecting. Ian Kershaw, commenting on the failed attempt by Goebbels and Albert Speer to approach Hitler in 1943 on what they perceived as the endemic problems of the Nazi state (among which, at least for Goebbels, was the absence of radicalization of the home front), concluded unambiguously: “They were holding to the illusion that the regime was reformable, but that Hitler was unwilling to reform it. What they did not fully grasp was that the shapeless ‘system’ of governance that had emerged was both the inexorable product of Hitler’s personalized rule and the guarantee of his power.”⁶⁸

In conclusion, the key distinction between these two horrendous projects of the twentieth century lies in revisionism or similar developments that simply could not be imagined or implemented under the Nazi regime. The Nazis had no humanist original project to invoke—no enlightened reservoir of betrayed libertarian hopes to be resurrected against the abominations of Hitlerism. A Khrushchev-style blow to Hitler’s mystical cult is just not imaginable. The impact of Marxist revisionism and critical intellectuals can hardly be overestimated. The adventure of revisionism led Communist intellectuals beyond the system denounced as the cult of personality. Critical Marxism turned into post-Marxism, and even to liberal anti-Marxism. From within, true believers found Leninism wanting in its most powerful ambition, that of responding in a positively engaging way to the challenges of democratic modernity. As historian Vladimir Zubok argued, “The ethos of educated civic participation, resistance to the immorality of the communist regime, and belief in humane socialism was a feature common to the efforts of Russian, Polish, and Czech reformers and liberal-minded people of culture.”⁶⁹ This growing common ground of civic empowerment and emancipation became most obvious in 1968 and later in the echoes of the dissident movement in Western Europe. Apostasy appeared once the ideological fanaticism of Communist regimes was denounced from within. Leninism, in contrast to Fascism, ultimately collapsed in Europe because it lost its quasi-religious, hierocratic credentials.