Hyperion, 2002), p. 220.
62. Erik van Ree, “Stalin as Marxist: the Western Roots of Stalin’s Russification of Marxism,” in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 159-80. The model van Ree describes was the blueprint transferred onto Eastern Europe. A comparative analysis of the various forms of localizing Stalinism in the region with the type of ideology extensively described by Erik van Ree in his The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin—A Study in Twentieth-Century Patriotism (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002) could prove illuminating for cases such as Ceau?escu’s Romania, Gomulka’s Poland, Enver Hoxha’s Albania, or Erich Honecker’s GDR. For an example, see my notion of “national-Stalinism” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 18-36.
63. Nolte, La guerre civile europeenne, p. 47.
64. Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 579.
65. Ibid., p. 581.
66. Nolte, La guerre civile europeenne, p. 239.
67. I am developing a point made by Denis Hollier and Betsy Wing in their article “Desperanto,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 19-31. They discuss the cases of dissident anti-Fascists (to varying degrees from one individual to the other), such as Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Ernest Hemingway, and Andre Malraux, and their reaction to the illogic and senselessness of the late 1930s trials in Moscow, implicitly pointing out their inevitable disenchantment and awakening (especially p. 22 and p. 26).
68. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 573.
69. Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 561-62.
1. UTOPIAN RADICALISM AND DEHUMANIZATION
1. Here I take issue with those interpretations that regard Marxism as an ideological counterpart to different versions of Fascism. Whereas Marxism is doubtless a revolutionary theory, a critique of liberal-bourgeois modernity, its main thrust is related to the democratic heritage of the Enlightenment (a point also made by Shlomo Avineri). Fascism, by contrast, rejected liberal individualism and democracy without any claim to fulfilling these “mediocre” projects. There is therefore no way to invoke a “betrayed” Fascist original doctrine and therefore no possibility to think of “another Nazism” or “dissident, humanist Fascism.” For the line of thought I take issue with, see A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). In a similar vein, Gorbachev’s former chief ideologue, Alexander Yakovlev, found the seeds of totalitarian terror, especially the war against the peasantry, in the Communist Manifesto. In my view (and here I follow Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker), the continuity between Marx and Lenin was fundamental. Fascism, and especially Nazism, did not find its origin in a distorted interpretation of the democratic search for emancipation.
It is important to acknowledge that Lenin had a less fanatical perspective on this issue, discarding calls for the total destruction of the bourgeoisie and admitting the need to recruit members of the former capitalist class into the construction of the new order. See George Legget, The Cheka: Lenin’s Secret Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 115. Ernst Nolte invoked Zinoviev’s exterminist statement, made at the beginning of “Red Terror,” as a main argument for his historical precedence, “Schreckbild” theory of Nazism as a “counter-faith” opposed to Bolshevism. See Ernst Nolte, La guerre civile europeenne, 1917-1945 : National-socialisme et bolschevisme (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000), pp. 24 and 90. For the precedence approach, see also Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): “Like the French Jacobin, Lenin sought to build a world inhabited exclusively by ‘good citizens.’… Lenin habitually described those whom he chose to designate as his regime’s ‘class enemies’ in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of pest control, calling kulaks ‘bloodsuckers,’ ‘spiders,’ and leeches.’ As early as January 1918 he used inflammatory language to incite the population to carry out pogroms ‘over the rich, swindlers, and parasites. Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, of success and the attainment of the single objective: the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.’ Hitler would follow this example in regard to the leaders of German Social democracy, whom he thought of mainly as Jews, calling them in Mein Kampf ‘Ungeziefer,’ or ‘vermin,’ fit only for extermination” (Pipes, pp. 790- 91). On the issue of radical evil (das radikal Bose) and totalitarianism, see Hannah Arendt’s discussion in the Origins, and also Jorge Semprun, L’ecriture et la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 174-75: “A Buchenwald, les S.S., les Kapo, les mouchards, les tortionnaires sadiques, faisaient tout autant partie de l’espece humaine que les meilleurs, les plus purs d’entre nous, d’entre les victims…. La frontiere du Mal n’est pas celle de l’inhumain, c’est tout autre chose. D’ou la necessite d’une ethique qui transcende ce fonds originaire u s’enracine autant la liberte du Bien que celle du Mal… [At Buchenwald, the SS, the Kapos, the informers, the sadistic tortures were as much part of the human species as the best and the purest among us, from the victims. It follows from this premise the necessity of an ethics that transcends this original background in which are rooted both the liberty of Good and the one of Evil].”
2. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 192-206. On the concentration camps as the essence of both Communist and Nazi systems in their radical stages, see Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univesity Press, 1999), especially Istvan Deak’s unequivocal foreword.
3. “Que fascisme et communisme ne souffrent pas d’un discredit comparable s’explique d’abord par le caractere respectif des deux ideologies, qui s’opposent comme le particulier a l’universel. Annonciateur de la domination des forts, le fasciste vaincu ne donne plus a voir que ses crimes. Prophete de l’emancipation des hommes, le communiste beneficie jusque dans sa faillite politique et morale de la douceur de ses intentions.” See Francois Furet’s letter to Ernst Nolte, in “Sur le fascisme, le communisme et l’histoire du XXe siecle,” Commentaire 80 (Winter 1997-98): 804.
4. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 24-29. See also Jules Monnerot, Sociology and Psychology of Communism, trans. Jane Degras and Richard Rees (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953).
5. For a similar position on the Stalinism-Nazism comparison, see 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. 5.
6. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 380.
7. Peter Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996): p. 14.
8. George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 225-37.
9. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 36 and xi.
10. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) p. 554-55.
11. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 422.
12. Nolte elaborated his main theses in a controversial book published in German in 1997 that came out in French translation with a preface by Stephane Courtois, La guerre civile europeenne, 1917-1945:
