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 lost 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.
In 1945, chief ideologue Andrei Zhdanov criticized automatic purges based on class origin: “The ‘biological’ approach to people is very widespread among us, when the existence of some not entirely ‘convenient’ relatives or other, frequently long dead, is made a criterion of the political loyalty of a worker. Such ‘biologists,’ producing their distinctive theory of ‘inheritance,’ try to look at living communists through a magnifying glass.” Even Stalin, in the statement signaling his retreat from the Great Terror, admitted in 1938 the practice of indiscriminate mass purges (which at the time had harrowing consequences for those subjected to them): “It is time to understand that Bolshevik vigilance consists in essence in the ability to unmask the enemy regardless of how clever and cunning he may be, irrespective of how he adorns himself, and not in indiscriminate or ‘on the off-chance’ expulsions [from the party], by the tens and hundreds, of everyone who comes within reach.”93 The very notion of revolutionary vigilance treaded a thin line between exclusion and physical elimination. At the point of the radicalization of revolutionary utopia in action, the obsession of Lenin and Stalin (and for that matter other Communist dictators) with cleaning and purifying the “human garden,” Communism's focus on excision, transmogrified into extermination.94
ARGUMENTS FOR COMPARISONS
As a matter of principle, the comparison between Nazism and Communism strikes me as both morally and scholarly justifiable, at least because we can see enough similar as well as dissimilar elements to justify such a comparison. To deny this comparison (which after all inspired one of the great works of political and moral philosophy of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, and was developed not by right-wingers but by such democratic socialists as the Mensheviks) is a proof of self-imposed intellectual narrow-mindedness.95 Michael Scammell emphasized that “we cannot choose between our memory of Auschwitz and our memory of the Gulag, because history has mandated that we remember them both.”96 Scholars are not judges, and the confusion between these two roles can make some scholars oblivious to important distinctions. Comparison serves the work of understanding when it is used to highlight both similarities and differences.