Psychological and psychopathological explanations for these uniquely murderous regimes are not sufficient. Whereas Stalin and Hitler were in-controvertibly driven by paranoid exclusionary and exterminist impulses, it would be hard to consider Lenin a mentally unbalanced individual. As a matter of fact, even a staunch critic of Bolshevism like Christian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev saw Lenin as a paradoxical personality, an antidemocratic, neo-Jacobin revolutionary, yet a humane individual, animated by a thirst for equality and even a passion for freedom. Moreover, an additional dilemma that haunts any attempt at understanding the horrors of the twentieth century lies in the difficulty of fathoming “the level of the pathological debauchery accepted, approved of, and sustained by masses of people—including highly intelligent ones—and coming to be regarded as normal and justifiable practice.”12 Here is where the understanding of Fascism and Communism's revolutionary passion becomes vital. It is this spirit of radical transformation and renewal that mobilized the masses who pushed forward both movements throughout their existence. Fascism and Communism were incarnations or materializations of “a revolutionary experience of standing on the edge of history and proactively changing its course, freed from the constraints of ‘normal’ time and ‘conventional’ morality.”13 Both were born in the wreckage of the First World War in a Europe that seemed to have entered a new era where politics had to be radically redefined toward the glorious dawn of new left or right civilizations.
In fact, the catastrophe started earlier, in the Bolshevik apocalyptic vision of an unprecedented break with all liberal values and traditions, including the pluralist ethos of international social democracy. Going beyond the established comparisons between Hitler and Stalin, historian Robert Gellately brought Lenin back into the story of totalitarian political movements as the true architect of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the real founder of the gulag system, a fervent ideologue convinced that his vanguard party (a revolutionary political invention that shattered the praxis of international social democracy) was entrusted by an almost mystically defined history to achieve its goals and make humanity content forever, no matter the human costs. And the costs were indeed appalling, defying our capacity for representation. Ideological fanaticism mixed with all-consuming resentment explain Lenin's destructive ambitions. Lenin was not only the founder of political propaganda, the supreme priest of a new ecclesiology of the omniscient, infallible party, but also the demiurge of the concentration camp system and the apostle of universal terror. A true Bolshevik, Martin Latsis, one of the Cheka's leaders, said in 1918, “We are not waging war on individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, we do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet power. The first questions you ought to put are: to what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education and profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.”14
In the same vein, Hitler saw the war with the Soviet Union and Western democracies as an ideological crusade meant to totally destroy the ideologically dehumanized enemy.15 Gellately quotes the recollections of one of Hitler's secretaries: “We will win this war, because we fight for an idea, and not for Jewish capitalism, which drives the soldiers of our enemies. Only Russia is dangerous, because Russia fights with the same fanaticism as we do for its worldview. But the good will be the victor, there is nothing else for it.”16
Bolshevism cannot be understood without admitting Lenin's paramount role. Without Lenin, there would have been no Bolshevism. Stalin was indeed the beneficiary of a system that Lenin had imagined and developed. In the absence of the ideology developed by Lenin, these regimes would have remained traditional tyrannies.17 Indeed, as sociologist Daniel Chirot emphasized, we deal with two types of despotic regimes: tyrannies of corruption (the traditional ones) and tyrannies of certitude, based on ideological hubris.18 It was the ideological pretense, the conviction that he was fulfilling a grandiose historical mission, that made Lenin engage in his reckless attempt to radically transform society. In his footsteps, Stalin pursued the same all-transforming agenda: nature, science, and language all had to be subordinated to the sacrosanct goal. The same ideological ardor, impervious to doubt or self-questioning, motivated Hitler's delusional visions of global race warfare.19 As Arthur Koestler demonstrated long ago, totalitarian movements disregard ethics and despise moral absolutes: “Since about the second half of the nineteenth century our ethical brakes have been more and more neglected until totalitarian dynamism made the engine run amok. We must apply the brake or we shall crash.”20
In spite of its claim to transcend alienation and rehabilitate human dignity, Communism was morally sterilized, or, in the words of Steven Lukes, it suffered from moral blindness.21 Once it subordinated the notion of the good to the interests of the proletariat, Communism annulled the universality of moral norms. The same can be said about Fascism, with its exaltation of the primeval tribal virtues and total disregard for the common humanity of all human beings. Both assigned to the state its own morality, granting only to it the right to define the meaning and ultimate aim of human existence. The ideological state became the supreme and absolute value within the framework of an eschatological doctrine of revolution. The horrors that defined the past century were thus possible because of a “moral inversion”: “The state's crimes [were] explicable not as crimes but as necessary precautions to prevent greater injustice.”22 Through the cult of absolute unity along the path to salvation by knowledge of history, both Communism and Fascism produced new and total social and political projects centered on purifying the body of the communities that fell prey to these ideological spells. The new men or women brought about by these movements left behind their “little ego, twitching with fear and rickets,” for they had surrendered what the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky called despairingly the “farce of individuality.”23 Or, as a former member of the German Communist Party once declared: “A man who fought alone could never win; men must stand together and fight together and make life better for all engaged in useful work. They must struggle with every means at their disposal, shying at no lawless deed as it would further the cause, giving no quarter until the revolution triumphed.”24 A strikingly similar statement can be found in Nazi chef propagandist Joseph Goebbels's early novel, Michaeclass="underline" A German Destiny: “What makes up the modern German is not so much cleverness and intellect as the new spirit, the willingness to become one with the people, to devote oneself and sacrifice oneself to it unstintingly.”25 Indeed, the times called for the dissolution of the individual into a heroic collective built on the rubble of a modernity that was declared defunct. Either from the left or from the right, the horrors of the twentieth century came about once “modernist revitalization movements” (in the words of Roger Griffin) became full-fledged state programs of social engineering.
Stalin's former henchman and close associate Vyacheslav Molotov's unrepentant evaluation of the Great Terror exemplifies the new dynamic between power and morality: “Of course there were excesses, but all was permissible, to my mind, for the sake of the main objective—keeping state power! … Our mistakes, including the crude mistakes, were justified.”26 Once these political movements constructed their vision of modernity on the principle of a chosen, purified community crossing the desert of history from darkness into light, there could be only one solution for those who failed to meet their inclusionary criteria: excision.27 Unsurprisingly, the same Molotov explained the oppression of the families of those purged, executed, deported, or assassinated as prophylactic action: “They had to be isolated. Otherwise, they would have spread all kinds of complaints, and society would have been infected by a certain amount of demoralization.”28 Similarly, in 1926, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, an official Bolshevik historian and Joseph Stalin's confidant, justified the purges decided at the sixteenth party conference (April 1929) as a method of protecting “the cells of the party and soviet organism from ‘degeneration.’”29