The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  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. François 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. Kołakowski, 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. 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'épreuve des totalitarismes (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).

  53. Martin Malia, “Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity,” in Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, 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 passé nous faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire 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 Stéphane 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): 1
91-201. 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 pavé 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. Stéphane 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 official discourse during the Cold War, while the Holocaust intensively preoccupied academia and the public only starting in the 1970s.

  78. Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” p. 41.

  79. “Vilnius declaration of the OSCE parliamentary assembly and resolutions adopted at the eighteenth annual session” (Vilnius, June 29 to July 3, 2009), http://www.oscepa.org/images/stories/documents/activities/1.Annual%20Session/2009_Vilnius/Final_Vilnius_Declaration_ENG.pdf. The Prague Declaration and the OSCE Resolution are hardly singular. Other official, pan-European or trans-Atlantic documents have been made to condemn the criminality of Communism and Stalinism following the example of the criminalization of Fascism and Nazism, for example, the EU Parliament resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism or the building of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. This monument was dedicated by President George W. Bush on Tuesday, June 12, 2007. June 12 was chosen because it was the twentieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's famous Brandenburg Gate speech. See http://www.globalmuseumoncommunism.org/voc.

  80. Quoted in Carolyn J. Dean, “Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and ‘Exorbitant' Jewish Memory,” History and Memory 18, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2006): 43-85. Though I disagree with Carolyn Dean's conclusions regarding authors such as Furet, Courtois, Besançon, and Todorov, I think her detailed presentation of the French debate on “which is more evil, Communism or Nazism” shows the intrinsic fallacy of such an argumentation: it is a dead end knowledge-wise, for any resolution on the topic will always be partisan.

  81. Ibid., p. 73.

  82. For recent analysis of the fate of the Black Book of Nazi Crimes against the Soviet Jews, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

  83. Igal Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 6.

  84. Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, “State Violence—Violent Societies,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 213.

  85. Eric D. Weitz, “On Certainties and Ambivalences: Reply to My Critics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 63. See the other contributions to the debate stirred by Weitz's initial article: Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1-29. He received replies from Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 30-43; Amir Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 44-53; and Alaina Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept'? Race as Discursive Practice,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 54-61. Peter Fritzsche offered, later on, interesting responses to Weitz's approach in “Genocide and Global Discourse,” German History 23, no. 1 (2005): 96-111.

  86. Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution, p. 5.

  87. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship, More or Less Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 487-528; and Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). Alexopoulos's research leads us to a conclusion similar to Jowitt's: “The practice of giving and taking rights for political purposes produced a highly fragmented society where individuals experienced different and unstable states of civic belonging” (p. 490). Similarly, Jowitt argued that “the critical issue facing Leninist regimes was citizenship. The political individuation of an article potential citizenry treated contemptuously by an inclusive (not democratic), neotraditional (not modernized) Leninist polity was the cause of Leninist breakdown.” Ken Jowitt, “Weber, Trotsky and Holmes on the Study of Leninist Regimes,” Journal of International Affairs (2001): 44.

  88. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship,” p. 521. It should be noted here that Alexopoulos makes this statement in agreement with Weitz's racialization thesis.

  89. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provides the following definition: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births with
in the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

  90. Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 17.

  91. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 281-302.

  92. Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key,” p. 175.

  93. Both quotations are from David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 397-98 and 388.

  94. For the role of excision in Soviet population politics, see Amir Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1114-55.

  95. Andre Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  96. Michael Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” p. 41.

  97. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 332-33. See also Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (London: New Press, 2003), pp. 136 and 144.

  98. Nicolas Werth, “Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henry 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), p. 90. As pointed out by Werth, Overy, Martin, and Applebaum, legal decisions such as Article 58-10 of the Soviet Penal Code, the State Theft Law of 1947, the 1933 instructions adding to the existent 1924 resolution of the TsIK regarding sotsvredbye (socially harmful) elements, NKVD Decrees 00447 and 00485, etc., generated an ever-widening array of criteria for criminalizing larger and larger sections of Soviet society.

  99. Both quotes come from Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe's Edge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), p. 185. For his discussion of the role of forced labor under Soviet Communism, see pp. 191-93.