The comparative evaluation and memory of Communism and Fascism were undeniably marked, mediated, and instrumentalized by the tradition of anti-Fascism in the West. At the root of this fundamental intellectual and public ethos lay a flawed and guilty interpretation of the Communist past. The latter was defined, on the one hand, by silence, partiality, or ignorance regarding the crimes and dictatorship of Leninist party-states, and on the other hand, by the difficulty of separating anti-Fascism from the imperialist propaganda of the Soviet Union during the twentieth century (or China, and their various satellites). The case of the Spanish Civil War remains paradigmatic for the entire history of anti-Fascism. François Furet gave an excellent characterization of the grievous misrepresentation that engendered this tradition: “Communist antifascism had two faces, neither of which happened to be democratic; the first face that of solidarity, which had ennobled so many soldiers, perpetually concealed the pursuit of power and the confiscation of liberty.” Anti-Fascism functioned for most of its existence on the principle that cohesion had to be defended at all costs, even if this meant, to paraphrase Francis Ponge, taking the party out of things (the original coinage is “le parti pris des choses”). In Furet’s words, “In the hour of the Great Terror, Bolshevism reinvented itself as liberty by virtue of a negation.”38
Subsequently, anti-Fascism was put in the situation of always turning out to be a mere rhetoric of democracy and freedom. It harbored “existential untruths” (to use Diner’s term), which it consistently failed to address because of its unflinching dedication to the Communist (i.e., Soviet) core ideology. Anti-Fascism therefore acquired a split personality: “It encompassed the totalitarian satraps of Eastern Europe as well as the political cosmos of the Western European Left from 1945 well into the 1970s.”39 Its proponents (and nowadays its survivors) adopted a hegemonic pretense to socialist utopia’s innocence in utter disregard of the criminality of the utopia in power. This anti-Fascist monopoly over the past “afflicted the very past itself.”40
The anti-Fascist promise failed because of its umbilical connection to the Moscow center. It is difficult, therefore, to agree with historian Geoff Eley, who stated that the 1943-47 moment of anti-Fascist unity lost out because of “the sharpening tensions between the Soviet Union and United States…. [A]nd as Stalin hauled the communist parties back to a language of soviets and proletarian dictatorship, this sanctifying of parliamentarianism once again became a key marker of divisions on the left.”41 It failed because of the true nature of the Communist parties and of their leader, Stalin’s Communist Party (CPSU). It failed because it accepted the same contract of silence, the one it endorsed during the Great Terror, regarding the Zhdanovist offensive and the already sweeping Sovietization of some Eastern European countries (for example, the extermination camps and mass executions in Bulgaria between 1944 and 1947).42 Zhdanovism should not be reduced to simply meaning the “two-camp theory” spelled out by Stalin’s first lieutenant in September 1947 at the founding conference of the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform).43 When referring to the times of Zhdanov (zhdanovshchina), we think of the debate around official philosopher Georgi Aleksandrov’s History of West European Philosophy and the condemnation of Anna Akhmatova (slandered as driven by “a sex-crazed mystic longing for Catherine’s good old days”) and Mikhail Zoshchenko.44 These key moments of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War triggered in the USSR (and, by default, in the Soviet satellite countries) a new wave of terroristic frenzy under the guise of anticosmopolitanism and ideological remobilization. These domestic dynamics preceded the inception of the Cold War. Also, one should not forget the execution and imprisonment of millions of Soviet citizens scattered across Hitler’s Reich (POWs, individuals used as forced labor by the Nazis, or concentration camp inmates) upon their forced return by the Allies to the USSR. Postwar Soviet Union was the antithesis of freedom and democracy; it was indeed “a world built on slavery.”45 After surveying the existent data, Timothy Snyder concludes that “there were never more Soviet citizens in the Gulag than in the years after the war; indeed, the number of Soviet citizens in the camps and special settlements increased every year from 1945 until Stalin’s death.”46 With such a system spearheading the anti-Fascist movement, there was no chance for any renewal of the Left.47 But after the defeat of Hitler, anti-Fascism was entrenched as politicized will, feeding on its own self-righteousness, thrusting blindly forward in a frenzied activism. It thus only worsened a pre-existing fascination with Stalin’s “Great Experiment.” In this context, as Sydney Hook remarked, “Intellectual integrity became the first victim of political enthusiasm.”48
To come back to my earlier argument, the comparison between Communism and Fascism has been fundamentally tainted, intellectually and scholarly, both by the claim of the original innocence of Leninism (or the so-called ultimately humane and positive Communist utopia)49 and by anti-Fascism’s long-standing, resounding failure to denounce the murderousness and illiberality of Communist regimes. Additionally, the experience of the Second World War in various Western countries, with its violence, collaboration, treason, and often limited resistance to the Fascist occupier, left a muddled vision of justice. For example, in the case of postwar France, Tony Judt demonstrated convincingly that “the absence of any consensus about justice—its meaning, its forms, its application—contributed to the confused and inadequate response of French intellectuals to the evidence of injustice elsewhere, in Communist systems especially.”50