9. Emilio Gentile, “Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics—A Critical Survey,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1 (June 2005): 19-32. Gentile provides the following definition of “the sacralization of politics”: “This process takes place when, more or less elaborately and dogmatically, a political movement confers a sacred status on an earthly entity (the nation, the country, the state, humanity, society, race, proletariat, history, liberty, or revolution) and renders it an absolute principle of collective existence, considers it the main source of values for individual and mass behavior, and exalts it as the supreme ethical precept of public life.” Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 1 (2000): 18-55.
10. Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution, pp. 1-20.
11. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 249.
12. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, “Introduction. The Regimes and their Dictators: Perspectives of Comparison,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 25.
13. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 4.
14. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 71-72. See also the impressive documentation in Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (New York: Random House, 2004).
15. See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
16. Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 310.
17. See the pioneering volume edited by Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism; Marc Ferro, ed., Nazisme et communisme: Deux régimes dans le siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1999); Henri Rousso, ed., Stalinisme et nazisme: Histoire et mémoire comparées (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1999); Shlomo Avineri and Zeev Sternhell, eds., Europe's Century of Discontent: The Legacies of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003); Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
18. See Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 1-24.
19. See Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 483-580.
20. Arthur Koestler, The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 15.
21. See Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” in Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin, The Lesser Eviclass="underline" Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 154-65.
22. Richard Overy, The Dictators, pp. 303-6.
23. Hans Maier, “Political Religions and Their Images: Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7, no. 3 (September 2006): 273.
24. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 239-40.
25. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 30.
26. Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev, ed. Albert Resis (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 2007), pp. 262 and 270.
27. It can hardly be considered a coincidence the fact that the term byvshie liudi (former people), which became commonplace in Bolshevik speak, implied that those to whom it applied were not quite human. Moreover, according to Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, the term lishentsy, which became a legal category, etymologically “was related to the superfluous man (lishnii chelovek) of 19th century Russian literature.” Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World—from Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 204.
28. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 249. Molotov's case is particularly baffling on the matter of loyalty to party-state vs. loyalty to one's family. His wife, old Bolshevik and Central Committee member Polina Zhemchuzhina, was accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism in 1949. When the Politburo gathered to decide her fate, Molotov dared to abstain from voting. A few days later, he apologized for his conduct, praising the “rightful” punishment decided by the Soviet motherland for his spouse. He subsequently divorced her, opting for unflinching loyalty to Stalin. Upon the dictator's death, Polina came back from deportation. She remarried Molotov, and they lived happily ever after. Zhemchuzhina never criticized her husband and never publicly denounced Stalin's murderous regime. All in all, it could be said that she was the epitome of “the comrade in life and in struggle,” as the Communist magnates' spouses used to be called. Molotov's grandson, Vyacheslav Nikonov, is currently an influential Russian political commentator close to Vladimir Putin.
29. David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 214. Yaroslavsky's wife, Klavdia Kirsanova (1888-1947), was the rector of the Comintern's Leninist School. See Pierre Broué, Histoire de l'Internationale Communiste: 1919-1943 (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 1025.
30. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 235.
31. Pierre Hassner, “Beyond History and Memory,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henri Rousso, English language edition edited and introduced by Richard J. Golsan, trans. Lucy B. Golsan, Thomas C. Hilde, and Peter S. Rogers (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 283-85.
32. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 24-25.
33. Michael Geyer (with assistance from Sheila Fitzpatrick), “Introduction: After Totalitarianism—Stalinism and Nazism Compared,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, pp. 1-37.
34. Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1943-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.
35. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 315.
36. The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, p. 66. For fascinating details regarding the publication of Dimitrov's diary as well as of other essential books in the Yale University Press series Annals of Communism, see Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia (New York: Atlas, 2008).
37. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 321.
38. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 370.