The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  The authors of the Black Book succeeded in assembling enough information to construct a big picture that maybe for the first time made an undeniable case that the scale of the crimes against humanity committed by Communist regimes do matter. Despite arguments to the contrary, Communism should not and cannot be studied just like other important events in world history.65 What is unfortunate, and some of Courtois’ controversial introductory statements can be explained on this basis, is that it took too long to learn that “in the sorry story of our century, Communism and Nazism are, and always were, morally indistinguishable.” Indeed, as Tony Judt states, this rather belatedly consensual epiphany “justifies a complete recasting and rewriting of the history of our times.”66

  The book came out in France in 1997 and generated tremendous polemics, especially in such publications as Le Monde, Le Débat, and Commentaire. It was published at a time when the French intelligentsia had passionately discussed the mystifying appeals of Communism, as explored by the late François Furet in his masterful Le passé d'une illusion. Statements that were considered acceptable coming from Furet, one of the most respected and highly influential French historians, sounded outrageous to many former leftist intellectuals when presented in a very provocative formulation by the editor of the Black Book, Stéphane Courtois, in his introduction. Initially, the introduction was to be written by Furet himself, but when he passed away, Courtois, the editor of the journal Communisme, wrote a text that managed to irritate many French historians, political scientists, and journalists.67 Within a political and academic culture in which the radical Left had long exerted an inordinate influence (one may even use the term hegemony), Courtois’ blunt and not always very balanced statements regarding the inherent (and, for him, morally mandatory) comparability of Communism and Fascism were perceived as politically charged, a mere simulation of a thoroughgoing historical approach. Furthermore, scholars like Annette Wieworka accused Courtois of an attempt to use this comparison to make Communism look worse than Nazism (at least in terms of the number of victims).68 Two contributors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, decided to dissociate themselves publicly from the main theses of the introduction.

  The main problems with Courtois’ introduction were a fixation on figures and a failure to highlight not only similarities but also significant distinctions between Communist and Nazi systems of mass terror and extermination. Courtois opened the door to a practice that continues to haunt discussions about the criminality of Communism, especially in the former Soviet bloc: “an international competition for martyrdom” (in the words of Timothy Snyder). Courtois and others who amplified his model of analysis seemed to believe that “more killing would bring more meaning.” Indeed, one of the central risks incumbent in the comparison between Fascism and Communism is that it can unleash, if its stakes are gaining the upper hand in a competition over round numbers of victims, what Snyder called “martyrological imperialism.” And indeed, as “millions of ghosts of people who never lived”69 are released in various countries’ cultures, the memory of radical evil offers no meaning except for rationalizations in the service of national politics and discourses of historical entitlement.

  In comparing the number of victims under Communist regimes (between 85 and 100 million) to the number of people who perished under or because of Nazism (25 million), Courtois downplayed a few crucial facts. In this respect, some of his critics were not wrong. First, as an expansionist global phenomenon, Communism lasted between 1917 and the completion of The Black Book (think of North Korea, China, Cuba, and Vietnam, where it is still alive, if not well). National Socialism lasted from 1933 to 1945. Second, we simply do not know what price Nazism would have taken in victims had Hitler won the war. The logical hypothesis (supported by evidence such as the differences between how the Nazis implemented the day-to-day occupation of Poland and how they occupied Holland) is that not only Jews and Gypsies but also millions of Slavs and other “racially unfit” individuals would have died. According to Ian Kershaw, “The General Plan for the east commissioned by Himmler envisaged the deportation over the subsequent years of 32 million persons, mainly Slavs, beyond the Urals and into Western Siberia.”70 And, as the plan for resettling Jews has shown, such designs were themselves genocidal. Christopher Browning and Lewis Siegelbaum excellently summarized, for Nazi Germany, the core post-1941 identitarian mutation that created the potential for cumulative, irradiating racial exterminism: “The Nazi assertion of German identity as the ‘master race’ meant the destruction of both the freedom and the identity of those whom they ruled. Victory and empire completed the transition of the Volksgemeinschaft from the restoration illusion of a unified community of the German people to the Nazi vision of a racial community waging eternal struggle—a Kampfgemeinschaft.”71 As for the political opponents of Hitler's reign of terror, suffice it to remember Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

  Third, in the case of Communism one can identify an inner dynamic that contrasted the original promises to the sordidly criminal practices. In other words, there was a search for reforms, and even for socialism with a human face, within the Communist world, but such a thing would have been unthinkable under Nazism. The chasm between theory and practice, or at least between the moral-humanist Marxian (or socialist) creed, and the Leninist or Stalinist (or Maoist, or Khmer Rouge) experiments was more than an intellectual fantasy. Furthermore, whereas Sovietism and Nazism were equally scornful of traditional morality and legality in their drive to eliminate enemies, one needs to remember that for Lenin and his followers “re-education,” cruel and humiliating as it was, could offer at least some chance for survival for either the class enemy or their offspring. Diaries, letters, transcripts of inquiry commissions, and other public and private transcripts have shown the extent to which “speaking Bolshevik” (Kotkin) or becoming “ordinary Stalinists” (Figes) could become a mechanism on social (re)integration. In the words of an author who has extensively dealt with this issue:

  The road to Communist conversion, significantly narrowed during the era of sweeping purges, to be sure, always remained negotiable, though it could be very difficult indeed. The fact that a successful manipulation of the official discourse enabled at least a few to clear their names by distancing themselves from convicted family members points to the importance of the voluntarist kernel in Communism. The right to petition, to write a complaint protesting one's innocence, all this while using public language, did not disappear even during the worst days of the Great Purge. Neither class background nor national origins were an insurmountable obstacle.72

  This was not the case with the Nazi treatment of the Jews. As Tony Judt puts it, “If we are not to wallow in helpless despair when it comes to explaining why it came to this, we must keep in view a crucial analytical contrast: there is a difference between regimes that exterminate people in the inhuman pursuit of an arbitrary objective and those whose objective is extermination itself.”73 For the Nazis, and for Hitler in particular, the demonization of the Jews, and implicitly their excision, was part and parcel of the regime's millenarian vision of national salvation.74 Hitler described himself in July 1941 as “the Robert Koch of politics.” The Nazi dictator further explained the comparison: “He [Koch] found the bacillus of tuberculosis and through that showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jews as the bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition. Their ferment. And I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews; that the economy, culture, art, etc. can exist without Jews and indeed better. That is the worst blow dealt to the Jews.”75

  The most important pitfall of Courtois’ introduction is the fact that, by often turning a blind eye to these differences, his explanation for the flawed anamnesis regarding Communism's criminality opened the door to dubious interpretations. He stated that “after 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror. After initially disputing the unique nature of the persecution of the Jews by the
Nazis, the communists soon grasped the benefits involved in immortalizing the Holocaust as a way of rekindling antifascism on a more systematic basis…. More recently, a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented an assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world.”76 This is at best a distortion. As Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Jürgen Kocka, and other prominent historians have shown, it was only after 1970, or even after 1980, that the Holocaust became a central topic in the analysis and understanding of the Third Reich. The difficulties related to a recognition of Communist mass crimes are due to the long decades of state-controlled information in those countries, the belatedness of archival openings, and the nervous reaction of left-wing circles in Western Europe (especially in France, Greece, and Spain) to what they decry as a political instrumentalization of the past.

  There were two types of reaction to Courtois’ argument. Reviewers such as Scammell, Judt, Bartov, and Herf admitted that he was justified to a certain extent. Jeffrey Herf, for example, argued that “despite some important exceptions, Courtois has a point: In Western academia, scholars who chose to focus on the crimes of communism were and remain a minority and face the career-blocking danger of being labeled as right-wingers.”77 But, as Scammel and Judt pointed out, this is not a reason for imposing a choice between “our memory of Auschwitz and our memory of the Gulag, because history has mandated that we remember them both.”78 The Black Book builds a successful and convincing case for the equation between Communism and radical evil, thus placing it in the same category as Fascism. And most recently, this position has been endorsed in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and discussed in the EU Parliament, during the presentation of the Prague Declaration (signed by, among others, Václav Havel, Joachim Gauck, and Vytautas Landsbergis). For example, the OSCE's “Resolution on Divided Europe Reunited: Promoting Human Rights and Civil Liberties in the OSCE Region in the Twenty-first Century” states:

  Noting that in the twentieth century European countries experienced two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide, violations of human rights and freedoms, war crimes and crimes against humanity, acknowledging the uniqueness of the Holocaust … The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly reconfirms its united stand against all totalitarian rule from whatever ideological background … Urges the participating States: a. to continue research into and raise public awareness of the totalitarian legacy; b. to develop and improve educational tools, programs and activities, most notably for younger generations, on totalitarian history, human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms, pluralism, democracy and tolerance; … Expresses deep concern at the glorification of the totalitarian regimes.79

  Under the circumstances, one can hardly see the point in trying, as Courtois seemed to do (setting the tone for further rationalizations by others in later years), to appropriate the image of ultimate evil. His argument was turned into cannon fodder by those who wished to dismiss The Black Book altogether. French journalist Nicolas Weil emphatically declared at the time that the book was “an ideological war machine against the theory of the Shoah's uniqueness” which “minimized the memory of the brown period.”80 One cannot agree with such political coloring of the Black Book, but the volume did indeed generate a war of numbers, words, and memories that sometimes, especially in Eastern and Central Europe, had direct or indirect negationist and normalizing tonalities. An implicit causal relationship was established between remembering Jewish suffering and “forgetting” the pain of others, thus setting up a new wave of anti-Semitism in the public sphere.81

  The comparison between Communism and Nazism had been long sensitive in Russian, East European, and Western analyses. Courtois pointed to the disturbing writings of Vassily Grossman, the author of the novel Life and Fate, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature (and coauthor with Ilya Ehrenburg, in the aftermath of World War II, of The Black Book of Nazi Crimes against Soviet Jews, a terrifying report that the Stalinists banned).82 Both in that novel and in his shorter book Forever Flowing, Grossman insisted that the Stalinist destruction of the kulaks was fundamentally analogous to Nazi genocidal politics against groups considered racially inferior. The persecution and extermination of the Jews was as much a consequence of ideological tenets held sacred by the Nazi zealots as the destruction of the kulaks during Stalinist collectivization campaigns. One author with extensive knowledge of the Soviet archives argued, “It seems that Stalin and his henchmen believed in irredeemable, hopeless individuals who had to be eliminated no less than Hitler did.”83

  CONSTRUCTING THE ENEMY

  Millions of human lives were destroyed as a result of the conviction that the sorry state of mankind could be corrected if only the ideologically designated “vermin” were eliminated. This ideological drive to purify humanity was rooted in the scientistic cult of technology and the firm belief that History (always capitalized) had endowed the revolutionary elites (of extreme left or extreme right) with the mission to get rid of the “superfluous populations” (as Hannah Arendt put it). Communist regimes tried to permanently excise the segments of the society that it designated as potentially inimical to the realization of utopia. And, as Gerlach and Werth showed in the case of the Soviet Union, “the more defined and precise the Bolsheviks’ envisioned order became, the greater the number of those that were forcibly excluded from it.” In like manner, they created “a world of enemies, and ultimately there was no other solution to the threat that these imagined enemies posed than their total physical annihilation.” In this sense, the two authors conclude by stating that “mass terror was a Soviet variant of the ‘final solution.’”84 Historian Eric Weitz's concept of racialization falls in the same category. He considered it useful in explaining the way Soviet authorities alternated the designation of population categories subjected to terror with direct consequences regarding their imprisonment, execution, deportation, and so on: “It helps capture the malleability of assigned identities, how groups perceived as nations or classes can, in specific historical circumstances, come to be viewed as so utterly distinct from the dominant groups that only the term race captures the immense divide that is created. And the term also captures how, in different circumstances, populations can become ‘deracialized,’ as happened officially to many of the purged nationalities after Josef Stalin's death.”85

  Weitz's approach is just another entry on the long list of scholars who attempted to make sense of “the cycles of violence” (in the words of Nicolas Werth) that became the norm in the Soviet Union. At this point, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that there was an “embarrassing uniformity in the means to salvation advocated by the Nazis and the Communists, namely science (and the practices of reshaping the bodies politic accordingly).86 The crux of the matter was that in the Soviet Union (as for other Communist regimes) the population was organized based on criteria of exclusion and disenfranchisement according to the ideological imperatives and developmental tasks set up by the party. As Golfo Alexopoulos states, “In the Soviet Union, there were citizens and there were citizens.” As in Nazi Germany, citizenship rights increasingly morphed into a boundary between belonging and criminalization, between “the national self and the enemy others,” an indicator of friends and foes.87 The principle of the elect that was at the core of the Leninist theory of the historical subject realizing utopia was reflected in citizenship laws. Those deemed unworthy to hold and exercise the rights assigned to the Soviet body politic were disenfranchised, which in the case of Communist polities equaled de facto denaturalization and statelessness. Moreover, during certain periods in the evolution of these regimes, this rightlessness became an inherited disease. Under Stalin, “the deprivation of rights extended to entire kin groups, as family units were often punished collectively. The Stalinist state viewed enemies of various kinds as defined by ties of kinship; thus entire families los
t their rights as a group. Class enemies (Nepmen, traders, kulaks, lishentsy) and so-called ‘enemies of the people,’ as well as enemy nations (Germans, Poles, Koreans, Greeks, Chinese)—both Soviet citizens and foreign subjects—were rounded up as kin groups. The disloyalty of the fathers was thought to be passed down to the sons. Both rightlessness and statelessness became inherited traits.”88

  If one associates such findings with analyses of the camps’ population profile or with the nature of terror and victims of mass violence under Communist regimes (such as those provided by the authors of The Black Book), then the notion of “class genocide” advanced by Stéphane Courtois (Dan Diner uses the term sociocide) gains considerable weight. The victimization, imprisonment, and even execution of “kin groupings” based on a blanket, inheritable identity exclusively and commonly applied to all its members comes asymptotically close to the type of violence presupposed by the concept of genocide, as it is internationally defined.89 At times in the history of almost all Communist regimes (what Stephen Kotkin called “re-revolutionizing the revolution”),90 there are distinct stretches of perpetrating genocide against their subject populations. The crucial difference from Nazism, however, is that these practices were built into the system by consequence.91 Even if one agrees with Halfin that “because guilt in the Soviet Union was always a personal concept, the victim died not as an anonymous number but as a concrete individual convicted for specific actions,”92 deterministic victimhood did become a state norm under Communism. Even the internal debates within the Bolshevik party ruling circles testify to this point.