Lenin's impact on Marxism and his responsibility for the ethical abyss and the immense human sacrifice generated by Communism in the twentieth century is, I think, superbly expressed in the following formulation from Denis Holier and Betsy Wing: “Marxism brought history out of its infant stages, out of its speechless moments, and gave it a soundtrack…. Lenin discovered that history spoke the language of dialectical materialism. But one needs an announcer to broadcast the script.” And that radio was Radio-Moscow with the single voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. To continue this argument, only when the irradiating ideological center “ceased to be decipherable for the Marxist decoders” was it possible for “the contract of silence” regarding the criminality of Bolshevism to hold sway and the emancipation from Diamat to gain traction in the intellectual and political history of Marxism in Europe.67 Ironically, it was precisely the disenchanted return to “the great Marxist texts,” a forgotten and betrayed tradition, that allowed successive waves of revisionist de-Stalinization to rock the boat of the utopian party-state. There was no such tradition in the Nazi experience and no original, presumably humanist Holy Writ for disillusioned National Socialists to dream of resurrecting. Ian Kershaw, commenting on the failed attempt by Goebbels and Albert Speer to approach Hitler in 1943 on what they perceived as the endemic problems of the Nazi state (among which, at least for Goebbels, was the absence of radicalization of the home front), concluded unambiguously: “They were holding to the illusion that the regime was reformable, but that Hitler was unwilling to reform it. What they did not fully grasp was that the shapeless ‘system’ of governance that had emerged was both the inexorable product of Hitler's personalized rule and the guarantee of his power.”68
In conclusion, the key distinction between these two horrendous projects of the twentieth century lies in revisionism or similar developments that simply could not be imagined or implemented under the Nazi regime. The Nazis had no humanist original project to invoke—no enlightened reservoir of betrayed libertarian hopes to be resurrected against the abominations of Hitlerism. A Khrushchev-style blow to Hitler's mystical cult is just not imaginable. The impact of Marxist revisionism and critical intellectuals can hardly be overestimated. The adventure of revisionism led Communist intellectuals beyond the system denounced as the cult of personality. Critical Marxism turned into post-Marxism, and even to liberal anti-Marxism. From within, true believers found Leninism wanting in its most powerful ambition, that of responding in a positively engaging way to the challenges of democratic modernity. As historian Vladimir Zubok argued, “The ethos of educated civic participation, resistance to the immorality of the communist regime, and belief in humane socialism was a feature common to the efforts of Russian, Polish, and Czech reformers and liberal-minded people of culture.”69 This growing common ground of civic empowerment and emancipation became most obvious in 1968 and later in the echoes of the dissident movement in Western Europe. Apostasy appeared once the ideological fanaticism of Communist regimes was denounced from within. Leninism, in contrast to Fascism, ultimately collapsed in Europe because it lost its quasi-religious, hierocratic credentials.
CHAPTER 1 Utopian Radicalism and Dehumanization
We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.
—Grigory Zinoviev, Severnaya kommuna, September 19, 1918
For man, therefore, who despite a corrupted heart yet possesses a good will, there remains hope of a return to the good from which he has strayed.
—Immanuel Kant, “Concerning the Indwelling of the Evil Principle with the Good, or, on the Radical Evil in Human Nature.”
In order to massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin: kulaks are not human beings. But that is a lie. They are people! They are human beings!
—Vassily Grossman, Forever Flowing
La relation dialectique entre communisme et fascisme est au centre des tragédies du siècle.
—François Furet, “Sur l'illusion communiste”
Understanding the meanings of the twentieth century is impossible if we do not acknowledge the uniqueness of the revolutionary left and right experiments in reshaping the human condition in the name of presumably inexorable historical laws. It was during that century that, using Leszek Kołakowski's inspired term, “the Devil incarnated himself in History.” The ongoing debate on the nature and the legitimacy (or even acceptability) of comparisons (analogies) between the ideologically driven revolutionary tyrannies of the twentieth century (radical Communism, or rather, Leninism, or, as some prefer, Stalinism) on one hand and radical Fascism (or, more precisely, Nazism) on the other bear on the interpretation of ultimate political evil and its impact on the human condition.1 In brief, can one compare two ideologies (and practices) inspired by essentially different visions of human nature, progress, and democracy, without losing their differentia specifica, blurring important doctrinary but also axiological distinctions? Was the essential centrality of the concentration camp, the only “perfect society,” as Adam Michnik once put it, the horrifying common denominator between the two systems in their “highly effective” stage? (Zygmunt Bauman writes about our age as a “century of camps.”2) Was François Furet right in assuming that Communism's heredity was to be detected in the post-Enlightenment search for mass democracy, whereas Fascism symbolized the very opposite?3 Was Fascism, as Eugen Weber asserted, “a rival revolution” that saw Communism only as a “competitor for the foundation for power” (in the words of Jules Monnerot)?4
Comparisons between Communism and Fascism and between Stalinism and Nazism are both useful and necessary. My comparative endeavor focuses on the common ground of these political movements, while also recognizing their crucial differences.5 Moreover, I agree with Timothy Snyder that “the Nazi and Stalinist systems must be compared, not so much to understand the one or the other but to understand our times and ourselves.”6 Communism and Fascism forged their own versions of modernity based on programs of radical change that advocated homogenization as well as social, economic, and cultural transformation presupposing “the wholesale renovation of the body of the people.”7 They were both founded upon immanent utopias rooted in eschatological fervor. To put it differently, the ideological storms of the twentieth century were the expression of a contagious hubris of modernity. Therefore, the lessons we learn by comparing and contrasting them have a universal, almost timeless meaning for any society that wants to avoid a disastrous descent into barbarity and genocidal forms of extermination. Contemporary dilemmas of a globalized world can only benefit from examination of the disastrous fallacies of the past.
THE LENINIST MUTATION
Here it is important to highlight the point made by Claude Lefort and Richard Pipes: Leninism was a mutation in the praxis of social democracy, not just a continuation of the “illuminist”—democratic legacies of socialism. Equally significant, precisely because he insisted so much on the “causal nexus” and counterrevolutionary anguish and fears, German historian Ernst Nolte did not fully grasp the nature of Fascist anti-Bolshevism as a new type of revolutionary movement and ideology, a rebellion against the very foundations of European modern civilization. Indeed, as Furet (and, earlier, Eugen Weber and George Lichtheim) insisted, Fascism, in its radicalized, Nazi form, was not simply a reincarnation of counterrevolutionary thinking and action.8 Nazism was more than just a reaction to Bolshevism, or to the cult of progress and the sentimental exaltation of abstract humanity symbolized by the proletariat. It was in fact something brand new, an attempt to renovate the world by getting rid of the bourgeoisie, the gold, the money, the parliaments, the parties, and all the other “decadent,” “Judeo-plutocratic” elements. So Fascism was not a counterrevolution, as the Comintern ideologues maintained; rather it is itself a revolution. Or, to use Roger Griffin's more figurative phrasing, “The arrow of time points not backwards but forwards, even when the archer looks over his shoulder for guidance where to aim.” According to the same author, Fascism was “a revolutionary form of nationalism…. [T]he core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.”9 At stake is the reaction to the “system,” that is, to bourgeois-individualistic values, rights, and institutions. When Lenin disbanded the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, he was sanctioning a long-held scorn for representative democracy and popular sovereignty. The one-party system, emulated by Mussolini and Hitler, was thus invented as a new form of sovereignty that was contemptuous of individuals, fragmentation, deliberation, and dialogue. On January 6, 1918, celebrating the dissolution of pluralism, Pravda published the following: