François Furet insisted in his correspondence with Ernst Nolte that there is something absolutely evil in Nazi practice, both at the level of original intention and the implementation of Utopian goals. This is not to minimize in any way the abominations of Communism, but simply to recognize that, comparable as the two mass horrors are, there is something truly singular about the Holocaust and the manic perfection and single-mindedness of the Nazi Final Solution. Nazi ideology was founded upon what historian Enzo Traverso called “redemptive violence.” Its ethos merges anti-Semitism with “a ‘religion of nature’ based on blind faith in biological determinism to the point where genocide itself came to represent both ‘a disinfection, a purification—in short an ecological measure’ and a ritual act of sacrifice performed to redeem history from chaos and decadence [my emphasis].”97
In the case of the Soviet Union, after the war on the peasants, the Stalinist repressive machine, especially during the Great Terror, attacked all social strata. This form of repression had a distinctive volatile and unpredictable character. Hysteria was universal and unstoppable. Any citizen could be targeted. From this point of view, one could argue that Stalinist terror was more inclusive, amorphous, but also porous because it represents both “the extreme penalization of types of social behavior” and victimization based on “political-ideological standards for rooting out deviant language and ‘bad’ class origins.”98 Starting with Lenin and worsening with Stalin, the comprehensive grasp of state violence in the USSR revealed “an instant readiness to declare war on the rest of society” (as Scammel says). The result was that, according to Nicolas Werth, one in five adult males passed through the gulag. Here, one should also keep in mind the post-1945 campaign against “female thieves” (in reality war widows) or the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility to twelve in 1935.
In Nazi Germany terror was unleashed mainly against minorities (Jews, Roma, the disabled, or gays) and foreign populations. In the Soviet Union, terror brought about two worlds: the Soviet social body, made up of politically validated people, and the gulag, with the party and its repressive institutions mediating between the two realms. While in Nazi Germany the regime sought “its victims mainly outside the Volksgemeinschaft, the Soviet populace was the main victim of its own regime.” In other words, the war conducted by Stalin and the Leninist parties was internal, “a catastrophe ostensibly launched as a social upheaval, appropriating the idiom of class struggle and civil war.”99 Along similar lines, Richard Overy provides an excellent definition of the gulag, which in his view “symbolizes the political corruption and hypocrisy of a regime formally committed to human progress, but capable of enslaving millions in the process.”100 The state-building Stalinist blueprint, the one that became the core of the “civilizational transfer” implied by exporting revolution or Sovietization, was “dialectically” bent on purification and inclusiveness. This paradox is best expressed by the contrast between the 1936 constitution's description of a society made up of “non-antagonistic classes” and Stalin's November 1937 call for eradicating not just the enemies of the people but also their “kith and kin.”101
One can conclude that, in the Soviet Union at different stages, certain groups were indeed designated targets, but the exercise of terror applied to individuals of all social origins (workers, peasants, intellectuals, party and military cadres, former middle and high bourgeois, priests, even secret police officials). Soviet terror had a distinctly random character, for its sole purpose was the building of Communism through the total homogenization of society. Its rationale was the moral-political unity of the community. From this point of view, the violence inflicted on the population was ideologically functionalized. It never achieved the industrial scope of the Holocaust. It was, however, an end in itself. It was the other face of the Bolshevik regime's “modern agenda of subjectiviztion.” Those individuals who failed to become “conscious citizens engaged in the program of building socialism of their own will,” those who failed to understand their obligations as members of “the first socialist state,” those who erred in revolutionary vigilance, in other words “the failed hermeneuticists” of the great leap out of the empire of necessity became excess to the needs of the Soviet state. The Bolsheviks were interested in refashioning the human soul. The life of the individual could make sense only if it immersed itself in the “general stream of life” of the Soviet collective.102 It is no surprise that, as Orlando Figes remarks, the Russian word for conscience (sovest') as a private dialogue with the inner self almost disappeared from official use after 1917. On October 26, 1932, Stalin described the full nature of the Bolshevik transformation: “Your tanks will be worth nothing if the soul (dusha) in them is rotten. No, the ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”103
In the summer of 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, the output of the Bolshevik industry of souls was already on display: over 40,000 participants gathered for a physical culture parade on the Red Square entitled “The Parade of the Powerful Stalin Breed [plemia]” (my emphasis). At the end of the celebrations of the first decade of the existence of Fascist Italy, the newspaper Gioventù fascista gave an almost archetypical description of the totalitarian body politic: “With Fascism, a crowd has become a harmony of souls, a perfect fit of citizens actively participating in the great life of the State…. [T]his was a crowd with self-knowledge, aware of its obedience, its faith, and its fighting mettle, a crowd serene and secure, trusting in its Leader, in a State…. This was no faceless throng, but an image given shape and order by spirits educated in the epic of these new times; not an amorphous mass, but an amalgam of fresh values and intelligence.”104 The imagery employed by the Italian journalists would have surely been fitting for the rows of thousands of Soviet New Men and Women participating in the parade of the “powerful Stalin breed,” expressing the joy of these crowds celebrating their happiness and fortune to be offspring of utopia made reality under the guidance of the beloved Helmsman (Vozhd). What is striking in the passage, from the point of view of our discussion of Fascism and Communism, is the constancy of the signified despite the interchangeability of the key signifiers.
Even when it did not take on a directly exterminist profile (e.g., mass executions, death marches, and state-engineered starvation), Soviet terror took the form of forced labor whose economic utility was highly questionable. I disagree with Dan Diner on this point, for I consider that forced labor in the gulag had a primarily pedagogical and corrective character. In both Nazism and Stalinism, the camps fundamentally served an ideological function; all other aspects that could be assigned to them were epiphenomena to the ideological driving force of the two dictatorships.105 In the Soviet Union, the labor camps were “a cultural model,” a “peculiar wedding of discipline and representation,” which ensured that those inside would be trained and those outside terrorized. Most importantly, this negative model of organization within the Communist space was employed for the structuring and disciplining of even positive social milieus, such as factories and universities.106 Until 1956, the gulag was the blueprint of human management in the USSR. As Orlando Figes notes, it was “more than a source of labor for building projects like the White Sea Canal. It was itself a form of industrialization.”107 I would go even further: the gulag was the normative design at the basis of the Communist project of modernity, the original source of the misdevelopment brought about by all Soviet-type regimes.