80. Quoted in Carolyn J. Dean, “Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and ‘Exorbitant' Jewish Memory,” History and Memory 18, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2006): 43-85. Though I disagree with Carolyn Dean's conclusions regarding authors such as Furet, Courtois, Besançon, and Todorov, I think her detailed presentation of the French debate on “which is more evil, Communism or Nazism” shows the intrinsic fallacy of such an argumentation: it is a dead end knowledge-wise, for any resolution on the topic will always be partisan.
81. Ibid., p. 73.
82. For recent analysis of the fate of the Black Book of Nazi Crimes against the Soviet Jews, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
83. Igal Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 6.
84. Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, “State Violence—Violent Societies,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 213.
85. Eric D. Weitz, “On Certainties and Ambivalences: Reply to My Critics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 63. See the other contributions to the debate stirred by Weitz's initial article: Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1-29. He received replies from Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 30-43; Amir Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 44-53; and Alaina Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept'? Race as Discursive Practice,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 54-61. Peter Fritzsche offered, later on, interesting responses to Weitz's approach in “Genocide and Global Discourse,” German History 23, no. 1 (2005): 96-111.
86. Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution, p. 5.
87. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship, More or Less Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 487-528; and Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). Alexopoulos's research leads us to a conclusion similar to Jowitt's: “The practice of giving and taking rights for political purposes produced a highly fragmented society where individuals experienced different and unstable states of civic belonging” (p. 490). Similarly, Jowitt argued that “the critical issue facing Leninist regimes was citizenship. The political individuation of an article potential citizenry treated contemptuously by an inclusive (not democratic), neotraditional (not modernized) Leninist polity was the cause of Leninist breakdown.” Ken Jowitt, “Weber, Trotsky and Holmes on the Study of Leninist Regimes,” Journal of International Affairs (2001): 44.
88. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship,” p. 521. It should be noted here that Alexopoulos makes this statement in agreement with Weitz's racialization thesis.
89. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provides the following definition: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
90. Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 17.
91. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 281-302.
92. Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key,” p. 175.
93. Both quotations are from David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 397-98 and 388.
94. For the role of excision in Soviet population politics, see Amir Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1114-55.
95. Andre Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
96. Michael Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” p. 41.
97. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 332-33. See also Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (London: New Press, 2003), pp. 136 and 144.
98. Nicolas Werth, “Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henry 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), p. 90. As pointed out by Werth, Overy, Martin, and Applebaum, legal decisions such as Article 58-10 of the Soviet Penal Code, the State Theft Law of 1947, the 1933 instructions adding to the existent 1924 resolution of the TsIK regarding sotsvredbye (socially harmful) elements, NKVD Decrees 00447 and 00485, etc., generated an ever-widening array of criteria for criminalizing larger and larger sections of Soviet society.
99. Both quotes come from Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe's Edge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), p. 185. For his discussion of the role of forced labor under Soviet Communism, see pp. 191-93.
100. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 595.
101. Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1943-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.
102. For discussions about “Soviet subjectivity,” see Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key” and Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” in Language and Revolution, ed. Igor Halfin, pp. 114-35. See also Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 71-96; and Igal Halfin, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 34-40. For a critique of this approach, see Aleksandr Ėtkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 171-86.
103. Quoted in David Priestland, Stalinism and The Politics of Mobilization, p. 293.
104. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, p. 94.
105. For this point, see Richard Overy, The Dictators, p. 633.
106. Igal Halfin, “Introduction,” p. 14.
107. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 116.