1. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 395.
2. See Virgil Ierunca, Fenomenul Pite?ti (Bucure?ti: Humanitas, 1990). I also recommend the documentary Demascarea (The Unmasking), directed by Nicolae Margineanu, script by Alin Mure?an, produced by the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, Bucharest, 2011. The Pite?ti experiment was unleashed by local officers and their agents among the inmates based on orders coming from the highest Securitate echelons. It came to an end suddenly and inexplicably before Stalin’s death, and the organizers, charged with conspiracy to compromise the Communist regime, were executed in 1954, carrying to the grave the secrets of the operation. The story, however, continued to circulate in Romanian prisons and reached the West in the 1960s.
3. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 408.
4. Peter Fritzsche, “On Being the Subjects of History: Nazis as Twentieth-Century Revolutionaries,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 151.
5. See Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).
6. See Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 189.
7. According to Snyder, there were three periods in the mass murder perpetrated by the Soviet and Nazi regimes: “In the first (1933-1938), the Soviet Union carried out almost all of the mass killing; in the second, the German-Soviet alliance (1939-1941), the killing was balanced. Between 1941 and 1945 the Germans were responsible for almost all of the political murder.” Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 155. For a fascinating account of antifascism, see Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009), pp. 101-51; for the role of the Comintern’s Agitprop international network and the crucial participation of Willi Munzenberg and his circle, see Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Munzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2003); and Jonathan Miles, The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). Espionage on behalf of Stalin, hostility to Hitler, and attraction to a utopian “other world” blended in experiences such as those of Katz or the Cambridge leftist enthusiasts.
8. Throughout the volume I will alternate between the terms totalitarianism and political religion. I chose to employ this conceptual parallelism because I consider that the two terms have complementary functions. Following Philippe Burrin, I believe that “totalitarianism sheds light on the mechanism of power and forms of domination, while political religion aims at the system of beliefs, rituals and symbols that establish and articulate this domination. Totalitarianism emphasizes the modernity of phenomena, particularly the techniques of power, while political religion draws attention to a long-term perspective and the historical sediment and modern reapplication of fragments of a religious culture for political purposes.” See Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (1997): 346n28.
9. Emilio Gentile, “Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics—A Critical Survey,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1 (June 2005): 19-32. Gentile provides the following definition of “the sacralization of politics”: “This process takes place when, more or less elaborately and dogmatically, a political movement confers a sacred status on an earthly entity (the nation, the country, the state, humanity, society, race, proletariat, history, liberty, or revolution) and renders it an absolute principle of collective existence, considers it the main source of values for individual and mass behavior, and exalts it as the supreme ethical precept of public life.” 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): 18-55.
10. Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution, pp. 1-20.
11. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 249.
12. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, “Introduction. The Regimes and their Dictators: Perspectives of Comparison,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 25.
13. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 4.
14. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 71-72. See also the impressive documentation in Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (New York: Random House, 2004).
15. See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
16. Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 310.
17. See the pioneering volume edited by Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism; Marc Ferro, ed., Nazisme et communisme: Deux regimes dans le siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1999); Henri Rousso, ed., Stalinisme et nazisme: Histoire et memoire comparees (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1999); Shlomo Avineri and Zeev Sternhell, eds., Europe’s Century of Discontent: The Legacies of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003); Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
18. See Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 1-24.
19. See Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 483-580.
20. Arthur Koestler, The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 15.
21. See Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” in Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin, The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 154-65.
22. Richard Overy, The Dictators, pp. 303-6.
23. 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): 273.
24. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 239-40.
25. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 30.
26. Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev, ed. Albert Resis (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 2007), pp. 262 and 270.
