National-socialisme et bolchevisme (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000).
13. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 9-10.
14. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, trans. Jean Steinberg with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1970), p. 9.
15. Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 341.
16. Katerina Clark and Karl Schlogel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalin’s Russia in Nazi Germany—Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 412. The two authors discuss this communality and shared experiences of Germany and Russia/USSR, but they insist that “there is no Berlin-Moscow connection without Rome, and no Russia-German discourse without Italian fascism. These were the sites of synchronized historical experience of an entire epoch [Synchronisierung von Epochenerfahrung]” (p. 421).
17. Deitrich Beyrau, “Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in “Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945,” special issue, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 426.
18. Raymond Aron quoted in Pierre Rigoulot and Ilios Yannakakis, Un pave dans l’histoire: Le debat francais sur Le Livre Noir du communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), pp. 96-97.
19. On July 24, 1943, the Fascist Grand Council met for the first time since the beginning of the war. Its members voted 19-7 to request the king seek a policy more likely to save Italy from destruction. As Mussolini went to meet with the king, the Grand Council informed II Duce that Marshal Badoglio had been nominated prime minster and had the dictator arrested. Mussolini would later be freed by German paratroopers, but the ability of the supreme body of the National Fascist Party to depose Il Duce was in sharp contrast with the Nazi Party’s inability to get rid of Hitler, to overcome the Fuhrer principle. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), pp. 593-99.
20. See the chapter “Losing All the Wars” in R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
21. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 181.
22. Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p. xxxvii.
23. Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 173
24. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 350.
25. Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth,’ p. 257.
26. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 132-36.
27. Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger Publishers, 2003), p. 138.
28. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 421.
29. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), pp. 156-57.
30. Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin—a Study in Twentieth-Century Patriotism (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002), pp. 160-62.
31. Gentile quotes the fascist catechism of 1939: “The DUCE, Benito Mussolini, is the creator of Fascism, the renewer of civil society, the Leader of the Italian people, the founder of the Empire.” In Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, pp. 137-38.
32. Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen, “The Political (Dis)Orders of Stalinism and National Socialism,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 85.
33. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 4.
34. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 506. In the first broadcast after his return to Italy (September 18, 1943), Mussolini announced that the new state would be “Fascist in a way that takes us back to our origins.”
35. Quoted in Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 56.
36. Norman Naimark, “Stalin and the Question of Genocide,” in Political Violence: Belief, Behavior, and Legitimation, ed. Paul Hollander (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 47; Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
37. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
38. Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, pp. 261 and 224.
39. Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction: Legacies of Antifascism,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 14. Besides the articles from the special issue of the New German Critique that I quoted in this section, two others bring forth excellent insight about the anti-Fascism of Weimer Germany and of postwar Italy: Antonia Grunenberg, “Dichotomous Political Thought in Germany before 1933,” and Leonardo Paggi, “Antifascism and the Reshaping of Democratic Consensus in Post-1945 Italy,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996).
40. Dan Diner and Christian Gundermann, “On the Ideology of Antifascism,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 123-32.
41. Geoff Eley, “Legacies of Antifascism: Constructing Democracy in Postwar Europe,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 75 and 81.
42. For an illuminating study on this topic, see Ekaterina Nikova, “Bulgarian Stalinism Revisited,” in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2009).
43. Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 38-42.
44. Kolakowski, Main Currents, p. 885. For the latest account of the “philosophy debate” and of the post-1945 ideological offensive against science in the USSR, see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). For Zhdanovism (its origins, nature, and impact), see Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). Boterbloem shows how the cultural wars of 1946-48 were “dress rehearsed” as early as 1940 (pp. 210-13). Between 1945 and 1947, there was no attempt by Stalin to liberalize or reform the regime (despite the populace’s expectations and signals along these lines within the Politburo). On the contrary, during those years there was continuity with the prewar situation and a noticeable radicalization by means of the reignition of the politics of purge. See Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953 (New York: Praeger, 1996); and Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945- 1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
45. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 436-37; and Richard Overy’s review of this book, “A World Built on Slavery,” Daily Telegraph, May 20, 2003.
46. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 328.
47. For a telling account of the paradoxes and pitfalls of the European anti-Fascist Left in the aftermath of the Second World War, see Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins (New York: W.
