W. Norton, 1991).
48. Quoted in Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 232.
49. Michael Burleigh called this practice an act of indulging in “vicarious utopianism.”
50. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1992), p. 75.
51. Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction,” p. 17. I do agree with Henri Rousso’s rebuke of those who consider that anti-Fascism has run its historical course and argue that it is not relevant for the analysis of recent history. The absence of an identifiable adversary does not preclude the danger of totalitarian repeat or seduction. Having anti-Fascism and anti-Communism as inherent facets of European culture is crucial in learning from and avoiding the last century’s ideological hubris. Rousso argues that “[to the position] that antifascism continues to prosper despite the fact that its target disappeared more than a half century ago, we could reply that anti-communism finds itself in an identical situation today, for while there is no real adversary, there is nevertheless a temptation to create one out of whole cloth.” Henry Rousso, “Introduction: The Legitimacy of an Empirical Comparison,” in Stalinism and Nazism, p. 5.
52. See Marcel Gauchet, A l’epreuve des totalitarismes (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
53. Martin Malia, “Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity,” in Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Mark Kramer, trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. xvii. Courtois and several collaborators put together a follow-up to the Livre Noir, Du passe nous faisons table rase! Histoire et memoire du communisme en Europe (Paris: Laffont, 2002).
54. For an insightful approach to ideological despotisms, see Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994). I examined the relationship between ideology and terror in Leninist regimes in my book The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Daniel Chirot’s review essay on The Black Book can be found in East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 3 (Fall 2000).
55. V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), p. 11.
56. Vyshinsky quoted in Stephane Courtois, in “Crimes, Terror, Repression,” his conclusion to The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 750.
57. For this argument and Arendt’s quote, see Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (1997): 338.
58. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
59. Andrei Oisteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006).
60. E. A. Rees Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin Revolutionary Machiavellism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 99.
61. Fyodor Dostoyevski, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, intro. Joseph Frank (New York: Knopf, 2000). One of the characters in the novel became the symbol of a mentality often referred to as shigalyovshchina, described by noted Dostoyevsky scholar Joseph Frank as “social-political demagogy and posturing with a tendency to propose extreme measures and total solutions” (p. 727). Needless to add, for many critics of Bolshevism, Lenin was an emblematic exponent of this mindset.
62. E. A. Rees, Political Thought, p. 132.
63. Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics,” p. 52.
64. Michael Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” New Republic, December 20, 1999, p. 41.
65. I am responding here to some observations made by Hiroaki Kuromiya in his review article “Communism and Terror,” Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 1 (January 2001): 191-201. I consider that his conclusion that “the issue of terror will remain important, it will no doubt be studied merely as part (if a central part) of a larger episode in world history” needs one caveat. Communism is indeed part of a larger framework in world history, that of the ascendance of radical evil, in our times as man fell victim to statolatry (Luigi Sturzo), when the ends superseded any considerations about the means, when human beings became superfluous. Communism did generate consequences not produced by any other revolution or terror, besides the Fascist one. This is a point consistently overlooked in other reactions to the Black Book, such as Ronald Grigor Suny, “Obituary or Autopsy? Historians Look at Russia/USSR in the Short Twentieth Century,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 303-19; or Ronald Aronson, “Communism’s Posthumous Trial,” History and Theory 42, no. 2 (May 2003): 222-45. One can try and situate in the same category the genocide in Rwanda and that in Ukraine (as Aronson does), just for the sake of a Manichean capitalism versus Communism polarity, but it is hardly knowledge-productive. One can argue about terror as an epiphenomenon of specific historical circumstances (civil war, famine, capitalist offensive, etc., as Suny does), but the criminal nature of the Soviet regime lay bare from its inception (e.g., in the RFSR 1918 Constitution).
66. Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell,” New York Times, December 22, 1997, A27.
67. See Rigoulot and Yannakakis, Un pave dans l’histoire.
68. Personal conversation with Annette Wieworka, Washington, D.C., November 13, 2010. I also discussed extensively these issues with Stephane Courtois at the Sighet, Romania, Summer School on the “Memory of Communism,” June 2009.
69. Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 402 and 406.
70. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 462.
71. Christopher R. Browning and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Frameworks for Social Engineering. Stalinist Schema of Identification and the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 262.
72. Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key: The Communist Case of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 175.
73. See Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell.” Amir Weiner also makes an excellent point on this issue: “When Stalin’s successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death [concentration] camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution.” See Amir Weiner’s review of the Black Book of Communism in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 450-52.
74. Ian Kershaw, “Reflections on Genocide and Modernity,” in In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 381-82.
75. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 470.
76. Stephane Courtois, “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” in The Black Book, p. 23.
77. Jeffrey Herf, “Unjustifiable Means,” Washington Post, January 23, 2000, pp. X09. Herf, however, adds an important caveat to his argument (one stressed by other scholars discussing the Black Book): the crimes of Communism were a constant focus of scholarship and of
