108. Dan Diner, Cataclysms, pp. 192-93. A side comment to this discussion could be a reminder that in a Communist system the meaning and significance of forced labor should be explained starting from Marxian terminology. According to Marx, labor was “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities which a human being exercises whenever he produces.” Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton), p. 309. Therefore, forced labor in the gulag represented a method of exhausting individuals, of absolute takeover of the self. The zeks were spent human beings. This is maybe one of the crucial lessons offered by authors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nadejda Mandelstam, and Varlam Shalamov. For the liminal nature of gulag experience, what German philosopher Karl Jaspers defined as Grenzsituationen (limit-situations), and the impossibility of communicating it, see the chapters “Return” and “Memory,” in Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 535-656.
109. After 1945, the gulag increasingly merged with the civilian economy, which was being transformed into “a vast industrial empire” (in the words of Figes). It also became more and more unmanageable, and the consequences of “the culture of the champs” deepened its “contamination” potential. Upon Stalin's death, but also before it, the gulag was seriously shaken by large uprisings such as that of Norilsk. For a short history of the latter, see Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 529-34.
110. Overy, The Dictators, p. 643.
111. Werth, “Stalin's System during the 1930s,” in Stalinism and Nazism, ed. Henri Rousso, pp. 74-75. In this contribution Werth identifies four interrelated types of violence in Stalin: “The first arose out of the paranoia of a dictator constructing his own cult against ‘comrades in arms'; … terror directed at Party or economic cadres; … virtual criminalization of the daily behavior or ‘ordinary' citizens; … violence exercised against a number of non-Russian ethic groups.” This rule of arbitrariness for the sake of the etatization of Utopia is best summarized by Dan Diner in the following statement: “In the heyday of Stalinism, despotism and fear were the elixir of rule.” Diner, Cataclysms, p. 191.
112. Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality” New York Review of Books 56, no. 12, July 16, 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875.
113. Ibid.
114. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 406.
115. Peter Fritzsche, “On Being the Subjects of History: Nazis as Twentieth-Century Revolutionaries,” in Language and Revolution, ed. Igal Halfin, p. 151.
116. Norman Naimark, “Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide,” Telos 136, (Fall 2006): 14. In his piece, Naimark underlines the fact that the author of the concept, Raphael Lemkin, “was convinced that the international community should mount a legal initiative against states that attacked peoples, religious groups, racial minorities, and outlier political groups” (p. 15). Moreover, “all of the early drafts of the Genocide Convention, including the initial U.N. Secretariat draft of May 1947, included political groups in their definition. The Soviets, Poles, and even some non-communist members of the committees and drafting commissions objected” (p. 17).
117. Dan Diner, Cataclysms, p. 90.
118. Souvarine (sometimes spelled Suvarin), quoted in The Black Book, 296.
119. See his profound book Le malheur du siècle: Sur le communisme, le nazisme et l'unicité de la Shoah (Paris: Fayard, 1998).
120. Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 287.
121. I am paraphrasing Bartov. He gives a commendable portrait of the dogmatic mind: “One had to lie blatantly and consistently to oneself and one's society to make Bolshevism palatable.” Ibid., p. 286.
122. Dan Diner, “Remembrance and Knowledge: Nationalism and Stalinism in Comparative Discourse,” in The Lesser Eviclass="underline" Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 86-87.
123. For an excellent discussion on the differences between the gulag and the Holocaust and the process by which the latter's memory has been sacralized, see Gabriel Motzkin, “The Memory of Crime and the Formation of Identity,” in The Lesser Evil, ed. Dubiel and Motzkin.
124. Helmut Dubiel, “The Remembrance of the Holocaust as a Catalyst for a Transnational Ethnic?” in “Taboo, Trauma, Holocaust,” special issue, New German Critique 90 (Autumn 2003): 59-70.
125. See Krzystof Pomian, “Communisme et nazisme: Les tragédies du siecle,” L'Histoire (July-August 1998): 100-105. For a similar view, see Michael Scammel's review of The Black Book. In his review, Scammell notices that, in the American edition, some chapters lack bibliographies. In fact, at least in the case of the chapter dealing with Central and South-East Europe, authored by Karel Bartosek, the French edition included a list of further readings that was strangely deleted from the American translation. Indeed, one of my own books published in Romanian in 1996 was mentioned in Bartosek's bibliography (Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej, Bucharest, 1995).
126. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). He defines comparative trivialization thus: “At its heart lies the device of acknowledging Nazi atrocities but, as it were, ‘humanizing' them by pointing, indignantly, at crimes committed by others—crimes presumably as vicious as those perpetrated in the Third Reich … its historical function is to cover the special horror of German barbarity between 1933 and 1945, and to divert attention from studying barbarity in its own—that is to say, its German context” (pp. xi-xiv).
127. Quoted by Stéphane Courtois in his conclusion to The Black Book, p. 751.
128. I don't share philosopher Avishai Margalit's view that the ideological premises of Communism, universalistic and humanist at least in the Marxism texts, would make the application of the radical evil concept inaccurate. But Margalit's analysis of the differences between opportunistic and principled compromises remains illuminatingly useful. See his book On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
129. Alain Besançon, “Mémoire et oubli du communisme,” Commentaire, no. 80 (Winter 1997-98): 789-93. The essay was translated as “Forgotten Communism” in the American journal Commentary 105, no. 1 (January 1998): 24-27.
130. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 295.
131. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 2-3.
132. Martin Malia, “Foreword,” in The Black Book, ed. Stéphane Courtois, p. xx.
133. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship—Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000), pp. 36-38.
134. Lawrence Olivier, Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 33, no. 2 (June 2000): p. 399.
135. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Obituary or Autopsy?” p. 319.
136. Igal Halfin lists the categories defined by Chapter 13 of the Declaration: “(1) The so-called former people (byvshie liudi)—primarily religious functionaries and employees of the tsarist police and military; (2) class aliens—landowners, individuals who lived off unearned income, exploiters, private trades; (3) administrative exiles and individuals who had their rights suspended by a court; (4) individuals economically dependent on the previously listed; and (5) the mentally ill.” It is not difficult to see how these categories could balloon to the dimensions of an out-out war against society, as discussed above. See Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Of course, Suny could argue that this document falls in line with the principle that “some omelets that are worth broken eggs, but, as anyone making breakfast knows, first one should make sure that all the ingredients are available and remember that eggs must be broken delicately, not smashed so that yokes, whites, and shells all get cooked together” (“Obituary,” p. 318).