The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  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 Broué, 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,” Janrbücher für 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 européenne.

  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: 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 Ceaușescu's Romania, Gomułka'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 européenne, p. 47.

  64. Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 579.

  65. Ibid., p. 581.

  66. Nolte, La guerre civile européenne, 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 André 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 bolschévisme (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 Böse) and totalitarianism, see Hannah Arendt's discussion in the Origins, and also Jorge Semprun, L'écriture 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'espèce humaine que les meilleurs, les plus purs d'entre nous, d'entre les victims…. La frontière du Mal n'est pas celle de l'inhumain, c'est tout autre chose. D'où la necessité d'une éthique qui transcende ce fonds originaire ù s'enracine autant la liberté 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 discrédit comparable s'explique d'abord par le caractère respectif des deux idéologies, qui s'opposent comme le particulier à l'universel. Annonciateur de la domination des forts, le fasciste vaincu ne donne plus à voir que ses crimes. Prophète de l'émancipation des hommes, le communiste bénéficie jusque dans sa faillite politique et morale de la douceur de ses intentions.” See François Furet's letter to Ernst Nolte, in “Sur le fascisme, le communisme et l'histoire du XXe siècle,” 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 Kołakowski, 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 Stéphane Courtois, La guerre civile européenne, 1917-1945: 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 Schlögel, “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 pavé dans l'histoire: Le débat 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 Führer 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: Ox
ford 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.