The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  For Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, Bolshevism and Fascism represented two incarnations of the disastrous presence of the devil in history: “The devil … invented ideological states, that is to say, states whose legitimacy is grounded in the fact that their owners are owners of truth. If you oppose such a state or its system, you are an enemy of truth.”6 Both movements pretended to purify humanity of agents of corruption, decadence, and dissolution and to restore a presumably lost unity of humanity (excluding, of course, those regarded as subhuman, social and racial enemies). For the Communists, the fiend was represented by private property, the bourgeoisie, the priests, the kulaks. The Nazis identified the Jewish “vermin,” “Judeo-Bolshevism,” “Judeo-plutocracy,” and Marxism as the sources of all calamities. Fascism (and its radical version, Nazism) was adamantly anti-Communist. In the 1930s, Stalinism made anti-Fascism a pillar of its propaganda, seducing intellectuals and galvanizing resistance movements worldwide. Indeed, in the absence of anti-Fascist rhetoric, it is hard to imagine Stalinism becoming such an extraordinary magnet for so many otherwise intelligent and reasonable individuals. These people were convinced that by supporting the Popular Fronts, especially during the Spanish Civil War, they were opposing Nazi barbarism. The Communist International's propaganda machine defended human rights against the abominable atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, obscuring the fact that, until 1939, most mass crimes in Europe were in fact committed by Stalinists in the USSR.7

  Both revolutionary party-movements execrated and denounced liberalism, democracy, and parliamentarianism as degradations of true politics, which would transcend all divisions through the establishment of perfect communities (defined as classless or racially unified). Fundamentally atheistic, both Communism and Fascism organized their political objectives in discourses of alleged emancipation, operating as political religions meant to deliver the individual from the impositions of traditional morality and legality.8 To employ Italian political thinker Emilio Gentile's terminology, both were forms of a sacralization of politics of an exclusive and integralist character that rejected “coexistence with other political ideologies and movements,” denied “the autonomy of the individual with respect to the collective,” prescribed “the obligatory observance of [their] commandments and participation in [their] political cult,” and sanctified “violence as a legitimate arm of the struggle against enemies, and as an instrument of regeneration.”9 In the universe of these political movements, evil carried the name of those who refused, rejected, or did not qualify for the illumination delivered by the infallible party gospels. In the case of left-wing totalitarianism, historian Igal Halfin provides an excellent formulation: “The apotheosis of Communist history—humanity holding hands and marching toward a classless paradise—cannot thus be disassociated from Stalin's systematic attempt to eliminate those who reached the Marxist well but refused to drink from it.”10 Or, to turn to Nazism, for Hitler, Jews incarnated evil simply because for him they fell below the pale of humanity. They were simultaneously cowardly and omnipotent, capitalist and Communist, ostentatious and insidious, and so on. After seeing with Goebbels the so-called documentary The Eternal Jew, a piece of heinously crude propaganda, the German dictator concluded that “these are no longer human beings. They are animals. So it's not humanitarian but a surgical task. Otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish disease.”11

  Psychological and psychopathological explanations for these uniquely murderous regimes are not sufficient. Whereas Stalin and Hitler were in-controvertibly driven by paranoid exclusionary and exterminist impulses, it would be hard to consider Lenin a mentally unbalanced individual. As a matter of fact, even a staunch critic of Bolshevism like Christian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev saw Lenin as a paradoxical personality, an antidemocratic, neo-Jacobin revolutionary, yet a humane individual, animated by a thirst for equality and even a passion for freedom. Moreover, an additional dilemma that haunts any attempt at understanding the horrors of the twentieth century lies in the difficulty of fathoming “the level of the pathological debauchery accepted, approved of, and sustained by masses of people—including highly intelligent ones—and coming to be regarded as normal and justifiable practice.”12 Here is where the understanding of Fascism and Communism's revolutionary passion becomes vital. It is this spirit of radical transformation and renewal that mobilized the masses who pushed forward both movements throughout their existence. Fascism and Communism were incarnations or materializations of “a revolutionary experience of standing on the edge of history and proactively changing its course, freed from the constraints of ‘normal’ time and ‘conventional’ morality.”13 Both were born in the wreckage of the First World War in a Europe that seemed to have entered a new era where politics had to be radically redefined toward the glorious dawn of new left or right civilizations.

  In fact, the catastrophe started earlier, in the Bolshevik apocalyptic vision of an unprecedented break with all liberal values and traditions, including the pluralist ethos of international social democracy. Going beyond the established comparisons between Hitler and Stalin, historian Robert Gellately brought Lenin back into the story of totalitarian political movements as the true architect of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the real founder of the gulag system, a fervent ideologue convinced that his vanguard party (a revolutionary political invention that shattered the praxis of international social democracy) was entrusted by an almost mystically defined history to achieve its goals and make humanity content forever, no matter the human costs. And the costs were indeed appalling, defying our capacity for representation. Ideological fanaticism mixed with all-consuming resentment explain Lenin's destructive ambitions. Lenin was not only the founder of political propaganda, the supreme priest of a new ecclesiology of the omniscient, infallible party, but also the demiurge of the concentration camp system and the apostle of universal terror. A true Bolshevik, Martin Latsis, one of the Cheka's leaders, said in 1918, “We are not waging war on individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, we do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet power. The first questions you ought to put are: to what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education and profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.”14

  In the same vein, Hitler saw the war with the Soviet Union and Western democracies as an ideological crusade meant to totally destroy the ideologically dehumanized enemy.15 Gellately quotes the recollections of one of Hitler's secretaries: “We will win this war, because we fight for an idea, and not for Jewish capitalism, which drives the soldiers of our enemies. Only Russia is dangerous, because Russia fights with the same fanaticism as we do for its worldview. But the good will be the victor, there is nothing else for it.”16

  Bolshevism cannot be understood without admitting Lenin's paramount role. Without Lenin, there would have been no Bolshevism. Stalin was indeed the beneficiary of a system that Lenin had imagined and developed. In the absence of the ideology developed by Lenin, these regimes would have remained traditional tyrannies.17 Indeed, as sociologist Daniel Chirot emphasized, we deal with two types of despotic regimes: tyrannies of corruption (the traditional ones) and tyrannies of certitude, based on ideological hubris.18 It was the ideological pretense, the conviction that he was fulfilling a grandiose historical mission, that made Lenin engage in his reckless attempt to radically transform society. In his footsteps, Stalin pursued the same all-transforming agenda: nature, science, and language all had to be subordinated to the sacrosanct goal. The same ideological ardor, impervious to doubt or self-questioning, motivated Hitler's delusional visions of global race warfare.19 As Arthur Koestler demonstrated long ago, totalitarian movements disregard ethics and despise moral absolutes: “Since about the second half of the nineteenth century our ethical brakes have been more and more neglected until totalitarian dynamism made the engine run amok. We must apply the brake or we shall cra
sh.”20

  In spite of its claim to transcend alienation and rehabilitate human dignity, Communism was morally sterilized, or, in the words of Steven Lukes, it suffered from moral blindness.21 Once it subordinated the notion of the good to the interests of the proletariat, Communism annulled the universality of moral norms. The same can be said about Fascism, with its exaltation of the primeval tribal virtues and total disregard for the common humanity of all human beings. Both assigned to the state its own morality, granting only to it the right to define the meaning and ultimate aim of human existence. The ideological state became the supreme and absolute value within the framework of an eschatological doctrine of revolution. The horrors that defined the past century were thus possible because of a “moral inversion”: “The state's crimes [were] explicable not as crimes but as necessary precautions to prevent greater injustice.”22 Through the cult of absolute unity along the path to salvation by knowledge of history, both Communism and Fascism produced new and total social and political projects centered on purifying the body of the communities that fell prey to these ideological spells. The new men or women brought about by these movements left behind their “little ego, twitching with fear and rickets,” for they had surrendered what the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky called despairingly the “farce of individuality.”23 Or, as a former member of the German Communist Party once declared: “A man who fought alone could never win; men must stand together and fight together and make life better for all engaged in useful work. They must struggle with every means at their disposal, shying at no lawless deed as it would further the cause, giving no quarter until the revolution triumphed.”24 A strikingly similar statement can be found in Nazi chef propagandist Joseph Goebbels's early novel, Michael: A German Destiny: “What makes up the modern German is not so much cleverness and intellect as the new spirit, the willingness to become one with the people, to devote oneself and sacrifice oneself to it unstintingly.”25 Indeed, the times called for the dissolution of the individual into a heroic collective built on the rubble of a modernity that was declared defunct. Either from the left or from the right, the horrors of the twentieth century came about once “modernist revitalization movements” (in the words of Roger Griffin) became full-fledged state programs of social engineering.

  Stalin's former henchman and close associate Vyacheslav Molotov's unrepentant evaluation of the Great Terror exemplifies the new dynamic between power and morality: “Of course there were excesses, but all was permissible, to my mind, for the sake of the main objective—keeping state power! … Our mistakes, including the crude mistakes, were justified.”26 Once these political movements constructed their vision of modernity on the principle of a chosen, purified community crossing the desert of history from darkness into light, there could be only one solution for those who failed to meet their inclusionary criteria: excision.27 Unsurprisingly, the same Molotov explained the oppression of the families of those purged, executed, deported, or assassinated as prophylactic action: “They had to be isolated. Otherwise, they would have spread all kinds of complaints, and society would have been infected by a certain amount of demoralization.”28 Similarly, in 1926, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, an official Bolshevik historian and Joseph Stalin's confidant, justified the purges decided at the sixteenth party conference (April 1929) as a method of protecting “the cells of the party and soviet organism from ‘degeneration.’”29

  Such affliction-weary rhetoric about the body politic was hardly different from that employed by Himmler in his speech to SS leaders at Posen in October 1943. The Reichsführer-SS described Nazi policies as extermination of “a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it.”30 To paraphrase Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini, both Fascism and Communism decided they had found the key to happiness, virtue, and infallibility, and were prepared to kill in applying it to specific societies.

  THE ENIGMA OF TOTALITARIANISM

  Herein lies the essence and mystery of the totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century: “The complete rejection of all barriers and all restraints that politics, civilization, morality, religion, natural feelings of compassion, and universal ideas of fraternity have constructed in order to moderate, repress, or sublimate the human potential for individual and collective violence.”31 The real similarities between the Communist and Fascist experiments (the crucial role of the party, the preeminence of ideology, the ubiquitous secret police, the fascination with technology, the frenzied cult of the “New Man,” the quasi-religious celebration of the charismatic leader) should not blur significant distinctions (one being the absence of Nazi show trials or intraparty permanent purges). Nevertheless, historian Eugen Weber judiciously remarked that “the distinction between fascism and communism is relative rather than absolute, dynamic rather than fundamental.” Under the circumstances, one cannot help but ask the same question as Weber: “Isn't this fundamental similarity between totalitarian creeds and systems at least as important as their differences of view?”32 This book engages in a dialogue with the most influential contributions to these morally and politically urgent questions. The twentieth century was plagued by agonizing ideological polarizations whose effects continue to haunt our times.

  I agree with political scientist Pierre Hassner that despite the differences between Stalinism and Nazism, their fundamental and defining common characteristic was their genocidal frenzy. Or, to use Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer's formulation, “The phenomenon of the gulag as a manifestation of Soviet state violence and the Holocaust as the central site of Nazi terror conveys the unmistakable message that the two regimes were bent on genocide [my italics].”33 On the one hand, both Stalinism and Nazism looked for “objective enemies” and operated with notions of collective, even genetic guilt. Obviously, the Bolshevik vision stigmatized political “sins,” whereas the Nazi Weltanschauung reified biological distinctions. In his enormously significant toast of November 7, 1937, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, as recorded by the Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov and in his diary, a speech meant to be known only by the top party and People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) elite, Stalin said, “Whoever attempts to destroy the unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities—that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the peoples of the USSR. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts,—yes, his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin! (Approving exclamations: To the great Stalin!)”34

  At the same, the party apparatus never played as powerful a role in Nazi Germany as it did in Stalin's Russia. In fact, Hitler envied Stalin for having been able to place political officers as ideological watchdogs in the army. Historian Ian Kershaw stresses the fact that even when Martin Bormann took over the party leadership in May 1941, thus bringing “the Nazi Party's interference and scope for intervention in shaping the direction of policy to a new plane,” the internal contradictions and incoherencies of the National Socialist state remained.35 The Nazi Party (NSDAP) never enjoyed the same charismatic status that the Bolshevik vanguard had acquired. In Hitler's Germany, loyalty belonged to the Führer as the embodiment of the pristine völkisch community. In Stalin's Russia, the zealots’ allegiances went to the leader to the extent that they saw him as the incarnation of the party's wisdom.

  When he maintained that the cadres decided everything, Stalin really meant it (with him being the ultimate arbiter of promotions and emotions): “A great deal is said about great leaders. But a cause is never won unless the right conditions exist. And the main thing here is the middle cadres…. They are the ones who choose the leader, explain our positions to the masses, and ensure t
he success of our cause. They don't try to climb above their station; you don't even notice them…. Generals can do nothing without an officer corps.”36

  STALIN, HITLER, AND THE APOTHEOSIS OF TERROR

  This indeed is a crucial distinction between Stalin and Hitler. Stalin for most of his rule was successful in finding a synthesis between government and ideology, system-building and ideological expansion. His politics of mobilization, however destructive for the Soviet population, did not obliterate the formal mechanisms of state administration. In Germany by contrast, “Hitler was at one and the same time the absolutely indispensable fulcrum of the entire regime, and yet largely detached from any formal machinery of government.” In this context, the institutions of the Nazi state were transformed into “a panoply of overlapping and competing agencies dependent in differing ways upon the ‘will of the Führer.’”37 In the Soviet Union, Stalin successfully managed to etatize the Leninist utopia—what he called “building socialism in one country.” In Germany, governmental disorder became an inescapable facet of the Nazi polity's cumulative radicalization. This difference between Stalinism and Nazism lies at the basis of Timothy Snyder's explanation for Stalin's inability to instrumentalize a new wave of terror against the Jews in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Soviet leader “found himself threatening security chiefs, rather than instructing them…. They [his subordinates] were constantly hindered by a certain attention to bureaucratic property and even, in some measure, to law.”38 According to political scientist Kenneth Jowitt, Leninism, understood as an organizational mode, was constructed upon the core idea of the “impersonally charismatic” party. Stalin, despite his development of the original model and his absolutism, simply could not bring another Great Terror upon a party that had just vindicated its historical messianism in what came to be called the Great Patriotic War for the Defense of the Motherland. Either the party, with its extraordinary organizational skills, was the main hero of the victory over the Nazi aggressors or it was a shelter of vicious enemies that needed to be exposed. Initiating a new onslaught against the Communist elite would have subverted the Great Patriotic War myth.