This is a book about the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. It is not a historical treatise (although history is present on every page), but rather a political-philosophical interpretation of how maximalist utopian aspirations can lead to the nightmares of Soviet and Nazi camps epitomized by Kolyma and Auschwitz. I discuss the major similarities, the saliently irreducible distinctions, and the contemporary reverberations of these totalitarian tyrannies. I also examine the deradicalization of Soviet-style regimes, the exhaustion of ideological fervor, and the rise of alternative, civic-oriented expressions of democratic sensibilities. The purpose of this book is to provide readers (students, journalists, historians, political scientists, philosophers, and a general audience) with some conclusions about a cataclysmic time that no words could capture as accurately and as disturbingly as the paintings of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Like those canvases, the twentieth century has left behind a devastated landscape full of corpses, dashed illusions, failed myths, betrayed promises, and unprocessed memories.
Many of this book's ideas were discussed with my late friend, the great historian Tony Judt. I also had the privilege to engage in many conversations with one of the wisest analysts of Marxism and Soviet Communism, Robert C. Tucker. Both Judt and Tucker emphasized the immense role of ideas in history and warned against any kind of positivistic determinism. They taught about the frailty of liberal values, and about the obligation to not give up but rather to continue fighting for them against all odds. The Polish thinker Leszek Kołakowski, often and accurately described as the philosopher of Solidarity, also had a major influence in shaping my ideas. I was the first to translate an essay by Kołakowski into Romanian in the late 1980s, in the alternative cultural journal Agora, which was published in the United States, edited by dissident poet Dorin Tudoran, and distributed illegally in Romania. I sent a copy to Leszek Kołakowski, who responded with a wonderful letter saying that, although he did not read Romanian, he could make sense, using his Latin and French, of my short introduction. One of the major projects I undertook in post-Communist Romania was to coordinate the publication of a translation of his masterful trilogy on the main currents of Marxism. Nobody grasped better than Kołakowski the appalling presence of the devil in the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century. All three hoped that mankind would internalize a few lessons from these catastrophes. I dedicate this book to the memory of these three major scholars.
Such a synthesis cannot be achieved in a few years. Overly optimistic, I signed a contract with the University of California Press in 2004, convinced that I would finish the book by the end of 2005. Then I realized that there were still too many issues I needed to think about. In the following years, I got involved in the institutional effort to analyze the Communist dictatorship in Romania. I learned terrifying details about the Stalinist technologies of destructiveness employed by Romanian communists. The work for this book started in 2001, when Tony Judt offered me the possibility to spend a month at the Remarque Institute at the New York University, where I presented a lecture on topics directly related to this volume, focusing on the French polemics around the Livre Noir du communisme. I continued my research in June 2002 as a one-month fellow at the Institute for the Sciences of Man (IWM) in Vienna. In January 2003, I was a fellow at Indiana University's Institute for the Humanities, where I gave a lecture on the totalitarian temptation and benefited from Jeffrey C. Isaac's insightful comments. In 2008-2009, as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, I conducted research on twentieth-century utopian radicalism as well as moral justice in post-Communist Romania. I benefited from the exceptional research skills of my two assistants, Eliza Gheorghe and Mark Moll. Books continued to come out that inspired me to rethink some of the early hypotheses, including Robert Gellately's path-breaking work Lenin, Stalin, Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (2007), which I reviewed in the outstanding journal Kritika. Another important volume was Beyond Totalitarianism (2009), edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer. In April 2009, Timothy Snyder invited me to participate in the seminar “Hitler and Stalin: Comparisons Renewed” at Yale University, where I exchanged views with several distinguished scholars, including Saul Friedländer, Norman Naimark, Lynne Viola, and Amir Weiner. Throughout these years, in his gently encouraging way, Stanley Holwitz, who had superbly edited my Stalinism for All Seasons at the University of California Press (2003), continued to inquire about the status of the manuscript. I kept reassuring him that I had not forgotten it. In fact, I had continued to think only about this, and in March 2010 I gave a lecture at the University of California at Berkeley titled “The Devil in History,” which presented the ideas published here in the prologue. Following that presentation, I had long discussions with historians John Connelly and Yuri Slezkine, who provided me with provocative suggestions.
Finally, in February 2011, the manuscript was completed. I sent it to Niels Hooper at the University of California Press, who expressed interest in the project. I received two immensely insightful peer reviews and followed many of the reviewers’ suggestions, especially in emphasizing the peculiar nature of the Bolshevik worshipping of the party, the connections between Marx and Lenin, and the still amazing infatuation of important intellectuals with the Communist utopia. I have developed many ideas included in this book in articles published since 2005 in the pages of Times Literary Supplement as well as essays for the excellent Romanian monthly Idei in dialog, edited by the brilliant philosopher Horia-Roman Patapievici.
This achievement would not have been possible without the enthusiastic commitment and creative research offered by Bogdan Cristian Iacob, a graduate student at the Central European University (he defended his dissertation in June 2011) who became my closest collaborator in 2007. I wish to express cordial thanks to all those who, throughout these years, have generously been my engaging partners in this endeavor. First and foremost, I express my gratitude to my wife, Mary Sladek, and my son, Adam Volo Tismaneanu, with whom I had endless discussions about the totalitarian monsters and their legacies. Mary read various drafts of this book and offered insightful suggestions. On various occasions, Adam asked me to explain the similarities and differences between Hitler and Stalin. Like so many of us, he still wonders who was worse. Intellectual friends and colleagues whose ideas and suggestions have helped me shape my own interpretations and who undoubtedly deserve mention, including some who have passed away, include Bradley Abrams, Dragos Paul Aligică, Cătălin Avramescu, Matei Călinescu, Daniel Chirot, Aurelian Craiutu, John Connelly, Michael David-Fox, Karen Dawisha, Ferenc Fehér, Dan Gallin, Pierre Hassner, Agnes Heller, Jeffrey Herf, Paul Hollander, Dick Howard, Charles Gati, Irena Grudzinska-Gross, Jan T. Gross, Jeffrey C. Isaac, Constantin Iordachi, Ken Jowitt, Tony Judt, Bart Kaminski, Gail Kligman, Mark Kramer, Claude Lefort, Gabriel Liiceanu, Mark Lichbach, Monica Lovinescu, Steven Lukes, Daniel Mahoney, Adam Michnik, Mircea Mihăieș, Iulia Motoc, Vlad Mureșan, Mihail Neamțu, Virgil Nemoianu, Martin Palouš, Horia-Roman Patapievici, Marta Petreu, Andrei Pleșu, Cristian Preda, Ilya Prizel, Saskia Sassen, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, Vladimir Solonari, Ioan Stanomir, Radu Stern, Valeriu Stoica, Mihai Șora, Gale Stokes, Robert C. Tucker, Cristian Vasile, Christina Zarifopol-Illias, Viktor Zaslavsky, Vladislav Zubok, Annette Wieworka. Special thanks to my graduate students at the University of Maryland, who have been remarkable partners of dialogue during the seminars on Marxism, Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, and the meanings of political radicalism.