137. Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell,” p. A27.
138. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 295.
139. 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): p. 52.
140. In my view, the best analysis of the intellectual origins and transmogrifications of Communism and Fascism remains Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution: Ideological Polarizations in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction, 1991), with a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz (originally published by the University of California Press in 1981).
141. Evans, The Coming, p. 324.
142. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 220 and 240.
143. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 65.
144. The Black Book, p. 755.
145. See Weber, “Revolution?” p. 43.
2. DIABOLICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE (IL)LOGIC OF STALINISM
1. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 211-63.
2. One could argue, however, that the activities of the People's Court in Nazi Germany in the context of the obvious defeat in the war came very close to Soviet show trials. This institution functioned similarly to Stalin's courts during the Great Terror when trying the group led by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, which tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 in a failed attempt commonly known as Operation Valkyrie. See Hans Mommsen, Germans against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance under the Third Reich (London: Tauris, 2009).
3. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 400.
4. For one of the most thoughtful and still valid interpretations of the dynamics of the Soviet bloc, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
5. For a detailed discussion, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).
6. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 299.
7. G. R. Urban, ed., Stalinism—Its Impact on Russia and the World (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1982), pp. 103-4.
8. John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 21-95.
9. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 527.
10. For “Lenin's Testament” (his letters to the Party Congress), see Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000), pp. 464-80.
11. Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 81.
12. Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, pp. 556-60.
13. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York and Wildwood House: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 378.
14. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind, pp. 83-85.
15. Cohen, Bukharin, pp. 370-71.
16. In a conversation with Lev Kamenev (July 11, 1928) later published abroad by the Trotskyites, Bukharin declared, “Stalin knows only vengeance. We must remember his theory of sweet revenge.” According to Tucker, “This was a reference to something that Stalin had said one summer night in 1923 to Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky: ‘To choose one's victim, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed …. There is nothing sweeter in the world'” Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind, p. 57.
17. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Suicides within the Top Communist Nomenklatura: The Case of Mirel Costea,” Studies and Materials of Contemporary History, Academia Română, Institutul de Istorie “Nicolae Iorga,” n.s., vols. 910, pp. 138-153 [in Romanian with an English summary]. Once I obtained the above-mentioned documents, I published on my personal blog a short article about Costea's tragedy. Soon thereafter I was approached by one of his daughters, Dana Silvan, who lives in Israel. She wrote me that neither she nor her sister (now living in the United States) had any idea that their father had left that last message to them. Her interpretation is that, in emphasizing his boundless loyalty to the party, Costea was in fact trying to protect his wife and his daughters. For the meaning of the Pătrășcanu affair, see my book Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
18. Ethan Pollock, “Stalin as the Coryphaeus of Science,” in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 272. He adds prior to the above quote: “Instead of revealing ulterior motives behind Stalin's actions, top secret documents are saturated with the same Marxist-Leninist language, categories, and frames for understanding the world that appeared in the public discourse.” In Times Literary Supplement (January 28, 2000), Geoffrey Hosking made a similar remark in reference to the all-pervasiveness of Marxist-Leninist dogma: “Even when writing to each other in private they used the same language and articulated the same thoughts as in their public utterances.”
19. Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 225-37; Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 2 (June 1998): 384-425; and “The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists,” Russian Review 61 (January 2002): 35-51.
20. According to Stalin, unconditional support for and solidarity with the USSR, the homeland of socialism, was the touchstone of proletarian internationalism. This theory was used to justify the persecution and eventual elimination of all those Communists and other left-wingers who expressed the slightest reservation regarding the Soviet general line as codified by the leader and his associates. For the repression with the Third International apparatus in the USSR, see William J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2001).