On his path to absolute power, Stalin made violence the primary tool of his politics. During the period of greatest terror he circulated requirements as to how many people in a given district should be disposed of and approved sometimes hundreds of death sentences a day. During the trials, which were preceded by the torture of the accused, he sentenced to death members of all strata of society, his closest collaborators, eminent artists, practically the entire leadership of the army and clergy. Even his relatives were not spared. The wives of the executed were either murdered as well or sent to concentration camps along with everyone who questioned his unshakable leadership. Led by the logic of dictatorship (and of all mafiosi), he executed those who could testify to his crimes, since they had committed them on his orders.
Every dictator proclaims himself a spokesman for the people, that is, for everyone over whom he holds power, and he expends much effort to appear as a benevolent father. Dictatorship, proclaimed Lenin, cannot be administered by the entire working class (in part because they were not conscious enough and were corrupted by imperialism). It could be realized only by the vanguard, which had absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class. This is how terror is justified. In theory it is employed by one party with respect to all society. In reality it is employed by a handful of leading party functionaries and finally in the name of the one and only leader.
The great mass of a people, contemplated Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, is not composed of diplomats or even teachers of political law, nor even of purely reasonable individuals who are able to pass judgment, but of human beings who are as undecided as they are inclined toward doubts and uncertainty. Contempt for people and democracy is characteristic of all dictators. It allows them to conclude that it is possible to enslave the minds of the masses and that it is necessary — and correct — to devote all care and diligence to this effort if they are to rule. Dictatorships have gone as far as they can go in their methods of controlling human thought. To justify their deeds, which they claimed would protect society from ruin (whether from outside or within), it was necessary to create an image of the enemy who, no matter how weak and destined by history to disappear into eternal nothingness, is a constant threat and must be uncovered, isolated, and finally liquidated. Lenin had a wide range of enemies: the bourgeoisie, the White Guard, the imperialists, the members of all other parties, the nobility, and all of his opponents, whether they belonged to these categories or whether they were prominent artists or scientists who abhorred his terror. Hitler embodied evil, danger, and destruction in the figure of the Jew who was an enemy of culture, peace, and all humanity. (For contemporary Muslim fundamentalists, the United States and all democratic countries are the embodiment of evil. Among them, the most execrated is Israel.)
A dualistic view of the world, a strict delimitation between good and evil, is innate to human perception. Demons of darkness and light, devils and angels, the goddess of abundance and the god of the underworld — this division is found in all mythologies. Dictatorships bring this mythology to life: First they offer to rid the world of evil forever by simply exterminating evil’s representatives. Some are murdered straightaway without trial. Others are carted off to concentration camps, where they are slowly destroyed by hunger, arduous toil, and finally gas, like troublesome insects.
The dictatorship announces a merciless battle or fatwa against enemies of the state, of the people, or of the only true faith. Genuine cohorts of criminals are formed in the battle against an imaginary evil (at one time they were called the Cheka, at another the SS or SA, and at another State Security), and are determined in the name of an idea, a faith, or the unerring leader to commit violence, to torture and murder. Because the leaders well know the real character of their deeds, their rampages take place in secret. Often people living in the vicinity of an extermination camp had no idea what was going on behind the barbed wire. For months no news about the gas chambers leaked out, even though several thousand people were murdered there daily.
At its most glorious moments, a dictatorship appears to be indestructible and thus eternal. Even Hitler, for a short time, when he controlled an empire that encompassed almost all of Europe and reached from the Atlantic and North African coast to the Caucasus and the Volga, seemed undefeatable. Before his death, not only did Stalin rule the largest country in the world, whose territory spread to the Baltic republics and the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, but he also controlled puppet governments in a series of European and Asian countries. In these others, often numerous and influential Communist parties were subordinated to his will.
The dictator lawfully fastens the fate of his regime to his own. Although his merits are set up as indubitable, his glory as immortal, and the idea he serves as eternal truth, one day the dictator will fall in the battle he himself has unleashed, or he will die a natural or violent death. And suddenly, perhaps in the small Dominican Republic, the larger Spain, or the enormous Russia, the ingenious creation of the dictatorship established will collapse or at least begin to deteriorate.
The Betrayal of the Intellectuals
At the head of the two powerful European empires, which in many ways defined the insane events of the twentieth century, stood two semieducated men, two apparently down-and-out individuals. Hitler graduated from high school, Stalin not even that — he fled from a seminary before he could receive any education. Both attempted to adopt the persona of intellectuals; after all, they lived in a century of science. Hitler was even a decent painter and considered himself an art expert. He was a compelling orator who could fascinate a crowd. Stalin was a bureaucrat who excelled at nothing but intrigue, villainy, and boundless cruelty. When we examine what both of these homicidal maniacs preached, we are amazed at the emptiness, the backwardness of their words. They were preceded, or accompanied, however, by others who were more educated and who gave shape to their lunatic visions.
The creators of the modern Communist utopia were intellectuals: Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Lenin, who consciously abolished any sort of law and replaced it with revolutionary justice (or as he called it: revolutionary terror), was paradoxically an erudite lawyer. Even Fidel Castro graduated with a law degree, and Pol Pot, the Cambodian organizer of cruel revolutionary slaughter, studied at the Sorbonne. Educated revolutionaries proclaim principles, even values, that often go against everything mankind has achieved.
It was also college graduates who helped formulate the basic principles of National Socialism. Hitler’s right-hand man Joseph Goebbels received a doctorate in literature and philosophy. Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second, was also educated. He too tried to justify the murderous goals of the SS with a mystical theory of the exceptional individual and the historical calling of the chosen race. Albert Speer was apparently a capable architect, and he later designed megalomaniacal buildings according to Hitler’s ideas. Hans Frank was a lawyer by profession who, at least in the beginning, tried to get the regime to respect some basic legal norms such as the presumption of innocence until a defendant is proved guilty and the right of the accused to an independent defense. In the end, the opposite took place, and, as the absolute ruler of occupied Poland, he had on his conscience numerous illegalities, depredations, and murder.
The Wannsee Conference at the beginning of 1942 where the planned slaughter of Jews in all occupied lands was decided, as the historian Mark Roseman points out, was attended by primarily people with academic titles; two-thirds had university degrees, and over half bore the title of doctor, mainly of law.