It is important to acknowledge that Lenin had a less fanatical perspective on this issue, discarding calls for the total destruction of the bourgeoisie and admitting the need to recruit members of the former capitalist class into the construction of the new order. See George Legget, The Cheka: Lenin's Secret Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 115. Ernst Nolte invoked Zinoviev's exterminist statement, made at the beginning of “Red Terror,” as a main argument for his historical precedence, “Schreckbild” theory of Nazism as a “counter-faith” opposed to Bolshevism. See Ernst Nolte, La guerre civile europeenne, 1917-1945 : National-socialisme et bolschévisme (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000), pp. 24 and 90. For the precedence approach, see also Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): “Like the French Jacobin, Lenin sought to build a world inhabited exclusively by ‘good citizens.' … Lenin habitually described those whom he chose to designate as his regime's ‘class enemies' in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of pest control, calling kulaks ‘bloodsuckers,' ‘spiders,' and leeches.' As early as January 1918 he used inflammatory language to incite the population to carry out pogroms ‘over the rich, swindlers, and parasites. Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, of success and the attainment of the single objective: the cleansing of Russia's soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.' Hitler would follow this example in regard to the leaders of German Social democracy, whom he thought of mainly as Jews, calling them in Mein Kampf ‘Ungeziefer,' or ‘vermin,' fit only for extermination” (Pipes, pp. 790-91). On the issue of radical evil (das radikal Böse) and totalitarianism, see Hannah Arendt's discussion in the Origins, and also Jorge Semprun, L'écriture et la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 174-75: “A Buchenwald, les S.S., les Kapo, les mouchards, les tortionnaires sadiques, faisaient tout autant partie de l'espèce humaine que les meilleurs, les plus purs d'entre nous, d'entre les victims…. La frontière du Mal n'est pas celle de l'inhumain, c'est tout autre chose. D'où la necessité d'une éthique qui transcende ce fonds originaire ù s'enracine autant la liberté du Bien que celle du Mal … [At Buchenwald, the SS, the Kapos, the informers, the sadistic tortures were as much part of the human species as the best and the purest among us, from the victims. It follows from this premise the necessity of an ethics that transcends this original background in which are rooted both the liberty of Good and the one of Evil].”
2. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 192-206. On the concentration camps as the essence of both Communist and Nazi systems in their radical stages, see Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univesity Press, 1999), especially Istvan Deak's unequivocal foreword.
3. “Que fascisme et communisme ne souffrent pas d'un discrédit comparable s'explique d'abord par le caractère respectif des deux idéologies, qui s'opposent comme le particulier à l'universel. Annonciateur de la domination des forts, le fasciste vaincu ne donne plus à voir que ses crimes. Prophète de l'émancipation des hommes, le communiste bénéficie jusque dans sa faillite politique et morale de la douceur de ses intentions.” See François Furet's letter to Ernst Nolte, in “Sur le fascisme, le communisme et l'histoire du XXe siècle,” Commentaire 80 (Winter 1997-98): 804.
4. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 24-29. See also Jules Monnerot, Sociology and Psychology of Communism, trans. Jane Degras and Richard Rees (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953).
5. For a similar position on the Stalinism-Nazism comparison, see 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. 5.
6. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 380.
7. Peter Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996): p. 14.
8. George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 225-37.
9. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 36 and xi.
10. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) p. 554-55.
11. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 422.
12. Nolte elaborated his main theses in a controversial book published in German in 1997 that came out in French translation with a preface by Stéphane Courtois, La guerre civile européenne, 1917-1945: National-socialisme et bolchevisme (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000).
13. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 9-10.
14. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, trans. Jean Steinberg with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1970), p. 9.
15. Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 341.
16. Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalin's Russia in Nazi Germany—Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 412. The two authors discuss this communality and shared experiences of Germany and Russia/USSR, but they insist that “there is no Berlin-Moscow connection without Rome, and no Russia-German discourse without Italian fascism. These were the sites of synchronized historical experience of an entire epoch [Synchronisierung von Epochenerfahrung]” (p. 421).
17. Deitrich Beyrau, “Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in “Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945,” special issue, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 426.
18. Raymond Aron quoted in Pierre Rigoulot and Ilios Yannakakis, Un pavé dans l'histoire: Le débat francais sur Le Livre Noir du communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), pp. 96-97.
19. On July 24, 1943, the Fascist Grand Council met for the first time since the beginning of the war. Its members voted 19-7 to request the king seek a policy more likely to save Italy from destruction. As Mussolini went to meet with the king, the Grand Council informed II Duce that Marshal Badoglio had been nominated prime minster and had the dictator arrested. Mussolini would later be freed by German paratroopers, but the ability of the supreme body of the National Fascist Party to depose Il Duce was in sharp contrast with the Nazi Party's inability to get rid of Hitler, to overcome the Führer principle. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), pp. 593-99.
20. See the chapter “Losing All the Wars” in R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005).