27. It can hardly be considered a coincidence the fact that the term byvshie liudi (former people), which became commonplace in Bolshevik speak, implied that those to whom it applied were not quite human. Moreover, according to Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, the term lishentsy, which became a legal category, etymologically “was related to the superfluous man (lishnii chelovek) of 19th century Russian literature.” Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World— from Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 204.
28. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 249. Molotov’s case is particularly baffling on the matter of loyalty to party-state vs. loyalty to one’s family. His wife, old Bolshevik and Central Committee member Polina Zhemchuzhina, was accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism in 1949. When the Politburo gathered to decide her fate, Molotov dared to abstain from voting. A few days later, he apologized for his conduct, praising the “rightful” punishment decided by the Soviet motherland for his spouse. He subsequently divorced her, opting for unflinching loyalty to Stalin. Upon the dictator’s death, Polina came back from deportation. She remarried Molotov, and they lived happily ever after. Zhemchuzhina never criticized her husband and never publicly denounced Stalin’s murderous regime. All in all, it could be said that she was the epitome of “the comrade in life and in struggle,” as the Communist magnates’ spouses used to be called. Molotov’s grandson, Vyacheslav Nikonov, is currently an influential Russian political commentator close to Vladimir Putin.
29. David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 214. Yaroslavsky’s wife, Klavdia Kirsanova (1888-1947), was the rector of the Comintern’s Leninist School. See Pierre Broue, Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste: 1919-1943 (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 1025.
30. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 235.
31. Pierre Hassner, “Beyond History and Memory,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henri Rousso, English language edition edited and introduced by Richard J. Golsan, trans. Lucy B. Golsan, Thomas C. Hilde, and Peter S. Rogers (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 283-85.
32. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 24-25.
33. Michael Geyer (with assistance from Sheila Fitzpatrick), “Introduction: After Totalitarianism—Stalinism and Nazism Compared,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, pp. 1- 37.
34. Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1943-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.
35. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 315.
36. The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, p. 66. For fascinating details regarding the publication of Dimitrov’s diary as well as of other essential books in the Yale University Press series Annals of Communism, see Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia (New York: Atlas, 2008).
37. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 321.
38. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 370.
39. See Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
40. Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization, pp. 37-47.
41. Ibid., p. 421.
42. Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), p. 78.
43. Quoted in Gentile and Mallett, “The Sacralization of Politics,” pp. 28-29.
44. Overy, The Dictators, p. 650.
45. Felix Patrikeeff, “Stalinism, Totalitarian Society and the Politics of ‘Perfect Control,’” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 40.
46. Overy, The Dictators, p. 306.
47. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Politics as Practice: Thoughts on a New Soviet Political History” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 27-54. For S. Kotkin’s insight on “speaking Bolshevik,” J. Hellbeck’s description of “personal Bolshevism,” and Volkov’s discussion of the identitarian function of kul’turnost’, see Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-1938,” Janrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, no. 2 (1997); and Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’— Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism—New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 210-30.
48. Michael Halberstam, “Hannah Arendt on the Totalitarian Sublime and Its Promise of Freedom,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 105-23.
49. Overy, The Dictators; Peter Fritzsche, “Genocide and Global Discourse,” German History 23, no. 1 (2005): 109; Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), p. 98; Geyer, “Introduction,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 33; Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
50. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 193. For an extensive discussion of the relationship between “sense-making crisis” and Fascism, see Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman, eds., Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, vol. 2, The Social Dynamics of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 2004).
51. See Eric Voegelin, “The Political Religions,” in Modernity without Restraint: Collected Works (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 5:19-74.
52. Historian Stephen Kern, quoted in Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 161.
53. Hermann Rausching, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), p. 185, quoted in Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 259. Regarding the last sentence, it is worth quoting here Richard Pipes’s comment: “And one may add, what Bolshevism did and what it became.”
54. The formulation belongs to Walter Benjamin, who coined it in On the Concept of History. See Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 223.
55. See Nolte, La guerre civile europeenne.
56. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
57. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: Norton, 1990); Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).
58. Timothy Snyder, “Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?” New York Review of Books Blog, March 10, 2011, p. 2, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/.
59. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 391.
60. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
61. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York:
