Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler would not have been able to achieve their goals had they not known how to regiment, mobilize, and include large social strata in their efforts. Whereas Bolshevism was primarily a repressive ideocratic dictatorship, Nazism was, at least for its first years in power, a consensus dictatorship. Both represented the triumph of ideological constructs rooted in scientism, organicism, historicism, and voluntarism. For Lenin, class struggle was the ultimate justification for the ruthless persecution of aristocrats, priests, and wealthy peasants. The dehumanization of the enemy started basically with Lenin. This does not mean that Nazism was simply a response to Bolshevism, a panic-ridden reaction to an external cause (as suggested by German historian Ernst Nolte).55 The ideological roots of Hitler's politics were endogenous. There was a proto-Fascist tradition in Germany as well as in France.56 Still, at a certain moment, Stalinism incorporated the motifs and symbols of the ultranationalist Right and became, as Alexander Yakovlev and Robert C. Tucker have argued, “Bolshevism of the extreme right.”57 Timothy Snyder judiciously underlined that “the special quality of Nazi racism is not diluted by the historical observation that Stalin's motivations were sometimes national or ethnic. The pool of evil simply grows deeper [my emphasis].”58
Indeed, both Hitler and Stalin spoke of ethnic cleansing. For example, between 1937 and 1938, most of the victims of the Great Terror were either class or national enemies. However, a nuance emphasized by Snyder offers a caveat to the comparison between these two extremisms. In fact, Stalinism did not transform mass murder into political history, as happened in Nazi Germany. For Stalin, “mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism.”59 But, to take Snyder's point further, Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly founded its alternative, illiberal modernity upon extermination. The Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered.
Communism's appetite for ethnic cleansing, on top of “sociocide” (to use Dan Diner's term), was not rooted simply within Stalin's phobias and idiosyncrasies. Zhdanovism (the anticosmopolitan campaigns after 1946), the secret pogrom of the early 1950s, and the Slánský affair were part and parcel of the (il)logic of mature Stalinism.60 Ironically, they represented a victory of sorts by Nazism over its main ideological rival. As Martin Amis points out, the anti-Jewish terror planned by Stalin “would have modeled itself on the older Bolshevik idea or tactic of inciting one class to destroy another. It would have resembled the Red Terror of 1918 with the Jews very approximately in the role of the bourgeoisie.”61 Erik van Ree correctly emphasized that the real ideological originality of mature Stalinism was the synthesis between nation and class and between two main goals, national development and world Communism.62 The process of state-building in the Soviet Union produced very un-Marxist results. Instead of withering away, the bureaucratic Leviathan, abysmally corrupt and incurably inefficient, reached astronomic dimensions. Or, following the analyses of Ken Jowitt and Terry Martin, Stalinism talked about modernization but practiced neotraditionalism.
In short, it is no longer possible to maintain and defend the image of a relatively benign Lenin whose ideas were viciously distorted by the sociopath Stalin. Ideological obsession was the crucial element that determined the decisions of totalitarian leaders. They lived off ideology, in ideology, for ideology. The Bolshevik and Nazi messianic sects were tightly knit ideological constructions. The closest analogy, which I owe to Ken Jowitt, would be the fortress, the hermetically isolated castle whose inhabitants think and act alike. In spite of other questionable statements, Ernst Nolte is right when he underlines that, whereas Lenin was a Russian politician and Hitler a German one, the story was much more complicated. They were ideological prophets, and only ideology could explain the course of their historical interventions: “The fundamental question remains the exacerbation (Überschiessen) of novelty, of the hiatus which constituted the properly ideological. It is the ideological which begets the most meaningful actions. There may exist deep differences between the ideologies, but each one is defined by this simultaneous overcoming and by a kernel of legitimate and convenient elements and only ideological extremism that can equally generate and destroy.”63
Robert Gellately bluntly and unequivocally portrayed Lenin as “a heartless and ambitious individual who was self-righteous in claiming to know what was good for ‘humanity,’ brutal in his attempt to subject his own people to radical social transformation, and convinced he held the key to the eventual overthrow of global capitalism and the establishment of world Communism.”64 It is hard not to agree with him when he writes: “Lenin introduced Soviet Communism, complete with new secret police and concentration camps…. Once in power, Lenin enthusiastically hunted down anyone who did not fit in or who opposed the new regime, and he introduced the Communist Party purges that periodically called forth nationwide witch hunts…. Lenin did not become dictator simply by taking on the mantle of chairman of Sovnarkom (in effect its premier). Rather, he made his will prevail by his control of the great Marxist texts and perhaps above all by his ferocity.”65
Again, Ernst Nolte and Richard Pipes are not mistaken in examining the conflict between the two totalitarian states as one between similar constructions rooted in ideological frenzy and utopian hubris. After Hitler's coming to power in January 1933, “two great ideological states faced each other in Europe, two states whose attitude, in last analysis, was determined by conceptions, which considered themselves interpretations of both past and future world history, and who used these interpretations to make sense of human life.”66
Lenin created the praxis of voluntarism and Manichaeism necessary for the success of revolutionary action. In Lenin's political cosmology there was no way to reconcile the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; the triumph of the former was predicated on the destruction of the latter. In the same vein, as World War II confronted the Nazis with possible defeat, Hitler and his acolytes resorted to a radical acceleration of their genocidal policies against the Jews. The idea was that no peace with the Jews could be reached, under any circumstances.