True, Lenin was not the embodiment of the party bureaucracy. In this respect, Robert Gellately draws fine and necessary distinctions: during the Great Terror, Bolshevism created universal fear among all strata of the population. The Leninist project, as developed by Stalin, meant a continuous aggression of the party-state against all social groups, including the much-acclaimed proletariat and its party. Mass mobilization and fear were not mutually exclusive, and millions of ordinary citizens became involved in the bloody dramaturgy of hysteria and persecution.39 David Priestland correctly emphasizes that the specific dynamics of the Bolshevik regime under Stalin were the result of an ideological context similar to that of Lenin's years at the helm of the Russian Communist Party. Stalin continually agonized over finding the right combination of “proletarian consciousness as a vital force in history and politics,” science-driven progress, and the vision of a society or world structured according to class origin.40
Communism and Fascism shared a similar obsession with continually moving forward to avoid the damning specter of stagnation. Mao once stated that “our revolutions are like battles. After a victory, we must at once put forward a new task. In this way, cadres and the masses will forever be filled with revolutionary fervor instead of conceit.”41 Eugen Weber proposed a similar diagnosis for Fascism: “The fascist must move forward all the time; but just because precise objectives are lacking he can never stop, and every goal attained is but a stage on the continuous treadmill of the future he claims to construct, of the national destiny he claims to fulfill.”42 On the path to permanent transformation, both Communism and Fascism engineered (or, rather, aimed at) the extinction of the individual by inventing equally binding criteria of faith, loyalty, and status crystallized into a master political myth. And, indeed, this defines the religiousness of a collective existence—“Quand on met toutes les ressources de I'esprit, toutes les soumissions de la volonté, toutes les ardeurs du fanatisme au service d'une cause ou d'un être qui devient le but et le guide des pensées et des actions [When one subjects all resources of the spirit, all the will's submissions, all the ardors of fanaticism to a cause or a being that becomes the goal and the guide of all thoughts and actions].”43
Both Stalinism and Nazism emphasized the need for social integration and communal belonging through the exclusion of specific others. Historian Richard Overy describes the two regimes as “all holistic dictatorships.” They relied on “creating complicity, just as they operate[d] by isolating and destroying a chosen minority, whose terrorized status confirm[ed] the rational desire of the rest to be included and protected.”44 Their legitimacy was based upon a synthesis between coercion and consent. In this sense, totalitarianism was embodied by the masses, who “gave life and direction to it.”45 Both the Soviet Union and Germany went through massive social and political tumults in the aftermath of the First World War. By the time Stalin and Hitler came into power there was indeed “a wide popular consensus for a politics without conflict and a society without divisions.”46 In reestablishing and re-creating social order, these states proved to be both repressive and paternalistic. Society was structured according to categories such as class, race, nationality, and gender, each with specific consequences on the inclusion-exclusion axis. Both the Soviet Union (and later, the East European countries) and Germany were realigned demographically, geographically, and biologically according to imagined projects of the perfect citizenry. The developmental and exterminist metaphors adopted and implemented by the two dictators and their power apparatuses became the life framework for the subject population, the groundwork for the reinvention of both individual and collective identities. The macrostrategies of the state suffered a process of translation and adaptation into microstrategies of the individual. Socialization turned into political practice, into an effort to align “what one does with what s/he thinks and says about what s/he does.”47
Political practice was the area where the citizen came to terms with the deliberately ideological lived environment. Under the circumstances, terror could be used to refer to “a complex sensibility of existential dislocation that affects the population broadly under totalitarian rule.”48 Stalinism and Nazism were “states of terror” (as Overy puts it) because they tried to achieve homogenization by creating “battle communities” (in the words of Fritzsche) within which already existent differences were the subject of grotesque public dramatization and the object of elimination through “capillary organization” (Gentile's term) and constant mobilization. Collective and individual dislocation under conditions of state mobilization and state violence generated new social realities that sustained both genocide and a sense of belonging and unity in “fractured (German) and quicksand (Soviet) societies” (Geyer). Both of them were “extreme consequences of secular humanism” (Gentile) echoing the disillusionment and despair brought on by the traumatic experience of the Great War.49
Fascism and Communism, as political movements, were resolutions to a painfully and universally felt “sense-making crisis” throughout Europe.50 Born out of the cataclysmic barbarism and unprecedented violence of World War I, these apocalyptical movements proclaimed the advent of the millennium in this world or, to use political philosopher Eric Voegelin's formulation, they tried to immanentize the eschaton, to build Heaven on Earth, to eliminate the distinction between the City of Man and the City of God.51 Between 1914 and 1918, “in four years the belief in evolution, progress and history itself was wiped out” as the war “ripped up the historical fabric and cut everyone off from the past suddenly and irretrievably.”52 Communism and Fascism were reactions to this perceived anomy. They were attempts to give birth to a new sense of transcendence and belonging. From this point of view, they were, as Roger Griffin insightfully remarked, radical political modernisms.
IDEOLOGY AND INTENTIONALITY
The official Communist creed was rationalistic and lionized the legacies of the Enlightenment, while the Nazi ideologues (Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Baumler, Otto Strasser) insisted on the power of irrational, vital energies and scorned the allegedly sterilizing effects of reason. The reality was that, underneath the ostensible philosophical incompatibilities between the two rival ideologies, Nazism contained a number of tactical affinities with the much-decried Marxism. Hitler himself admitted that he found inspiration in Marxist patterns of political struggle: “I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. I don't mean their tiresome social doctrine or the materialist conception of history, … and so on. But I have learned from their methods. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun. The whole National Socialism is based on it … National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order.”53
It is well known that there are scholars who resist the very idea of a comparison between Communism and Fascism. Comparison can (but not always does) diminish the uniqueness of the absolute horror symbolized by the Holocaust and can overlook the fact that the ideological intentions were significantly different between the Communist and Fascist, or rather, Nazi, projects. Still, both were revolutionary ideologies that aimed to destroy the status quo (that is, the bourgeois order) and its enshrined values. Both movements proclaimed the leading role of a community of chosen individuals grouped within the party. Both detested bourgeois values and liberal democracy. One carried to an extreme a certain Enlightenment universalism, the other made an absolute of racial particularism. Lenin did not nourish xenophobic propensities, but Stalin did. At the end of his life, Stalin behaved like a rabid anti-Semite and prepared horrific pogroms. Both Hitler and Stalin used propaganda to dehumanize their enemies, the Judeo-Bolsheviks, the Trotskyites, and the Zionists. Fascism and Communism equally put themselves in position to “blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history.”54 They both aimed to demolish the past in the name of the future. Both totalitariani
sms cultivated the myth of youth, rebirth, and the future.
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler would not have been able to achieve their goals had they not known how to regiment, mobilize, and include large social strata in their efforts. Whereas Bolshevism was primarily a repressive ideocratic dictatorship, Nazism was, at least for its first years in power, a consensus dictatorship. Both represented the triumph of ideological constructs rooted in scientism, organicism, historicism, and voluntarism. For Lenin, class struggle was the ultimate justification for the ruthless persecution of aristocrats, priests, and wealthy peasants. The dehumanization of the enemy started basically with Lenin. This does not mean that Nazism was simply a response to Bolshevism, a panic-ridden reaction to an external cause (as suggested by German historian Ernst Nolte).55 The ideological roots of Hitler's politics were endogenous. There was a proto-Fascist tradition in Germany as well as in France.56 Still, at a certain moment, Stalinism incorporated the motifs and symbols of the ultranationalist Right and became, as Alexander Yakovlev and Robert C. Tucker have argued, “Bolshevism of the extreme right.”57 Timothy Snyder judiciously underlined that “the special quality of Nazi racism is not diluted by the historical observation that Stalin's motivations were sometimes national or ethnic. The pool of evil simply grows deeper [my emphasis].”58
Indeed, both Hitler and Stalin spoke of ethnic cleansing. For example, between 1937 and 1938, most of the victims of the Great Terror were either class or national enemies. However, a nuance emphasized by Snyder offers a caveat to the comparison between these two extremisms. In fact, Stalinism did not transform mass murder into political history, as happened in Nazi Germany. For Stalin, “mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism.”59 But, to take Snyder's point further, Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly founded its alternative, illiberal modernity upon extermination. The Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered.
Communism's appetite for ethnic cleansing, on top of “sociocide” (to use Dan Diner's term), was not rooted simply within Stalin's phobias and idiosyncrasies. Zhdanovism (the anticosmopolitan campaigns after 1946), the secret pogrom of the early 1950s, and the Slánský affair were part and parcel of the (il)logic of mature Stalinism.60 Ironically, they represented a victory of sorts by Nazism over its main ideological rival. As Martin Amis points out, the anti-Jewish terror planned by Stalin “would have modeled itself on the older Bolshevik idea or tactic of inciting one class to destroy another. It would have resembled the Red Terror of 1918 with the Jews very approximately in the role of the bourgeoisie.”61 Erik van Ree correctly emphasized that the real ideological originality of mature Stalinism was the synthesis between nation and class and between two main goals, national development and world Communism.62 The process of state-building in the Soviet Union produced very un-Marxist results. Instead of withering away, the bureaucratic Leviathan, abysmally corrupt and incurably inefficient, reached astronomic dimensions. Or, following the analyses of Ken Jowitt and Terry Martin, Stalinism talked about modernization but practiced neotraditionalism.
In short, it is no longer possible to maintain and defend the image of a relatively benign Lenin whose ideas were viciously distorted by the sociopath Stalin. Ideological obsession was the crucial element that determined the decisions of totalitarian leaders. They lived off ideology, in ideology, for ideology. The Bolshevik and Nazi messianic sects were tightly knit ideological constructions. The closest analogy, which I owe to Ken Jowitt, would be the fortress, the hermetically isolated castle whose inhabitants think and act alike. In spite of other questionable statements, Ernst Nolte is right when he underlines that, whereas Lenin was a Russian politician and Hitler a German one, the story was much more complicated. They were ideological prophets, and only ideology could explain the course of their historical interventions: “The fundamental question remains the exacerbation (Überschiessen) of novelty, of the hiatus which constituted the properly ideological. It is the ideological which begets the most meaningful actions. There may exist deep differences between the ideologies, but each one is defined by this simultaneous overcoming and by a kernel of legitimate and convenient elements and only ideological extremism that can equally generate and destroy.”63
Robert Gellately bluntly and unequivocally portrayed Lenin as “a heartless and ambitious individual who was self-righteous in claiming to know what was good for ‘humanity,’ brutal in his attempt to subject his own people to radical social transformation, and convinced he held the key to the eventual overthrow of global capitalism and the establishment of world Communism.”64 It is hard not to agree with him when he writes: “Lenin introduced Soviet Communism, complete with new secret police and concentration camps…. Once in power, Lenin enthusiastically hunted down anyone who did not fit in or who opposed the new regime, and he introduced the Communist Party purges that periodically called forth nationwide witch hunts…. Lenin did not become dictator simply by taking on the mantle of chairman of Sovnarkom (in effect its premier). Rather, he made his will prevail by his control of the great Marxist texts and perhaps above all by his ferocity.”65
Again, Ernst Nolte and Richard Pipes are not mistaken in examining the conflict between the two totalitarian states as one between similar constructions rooted in ideological frenzy and utopian hubris. After Hitler's coming to power in January 1933, “two great ideological states faced each other in Europe, two states whose attitude, in last analysis, was determined by conceptions, which considered themselves interpretations of both past and future world history, and who used these interpretations to make sense of human life.”66
Lenin created the praxis of voluntarism and Manichaeism necessary for the success of revolutionary action. In Lenin's political cosmology there was no way to reconcile the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; the triumph of the former was predicated on the destruction of the latter. In the same vein, as World War II confronted the Nazis with possible defeat, Hitler and his acolytes resorted to a radical acceleration of their genocidal policies against the Jews. The idea was that no peace with the Jews could be reached, under any circumstances.
Lenin's impact on Marxism and his responsibility for the ethical abyss and the immense human sacrifice generated by Communism in the twentieth century is, I think, superbly expressed in the following formulation from Denis Holier and Betsy Wing: “Marxism brought history out of its infant stages, out of its speechless moments, and gave it a soundtrack…. Lenin discovered that history spoke the language of dialectical materialism. But one needs an announcer to broadcast the script.” And that radio was Radio-Moscow with the single voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. To continue this argument, only when the irradiating ideological center “ceased to be decipherable for the Marxist decoders” was it possible for “the contract of silence” regarding the criminality of Bolshevism to hold sway and the emancipation from Diamat to gain traction in the intellectual and political history of Marxism in Europe.67 Ironically, it was precisely the disenchanted return to “the great Marxist texts,” a forgotten and betrayed tradition, that allowed successive waves of revisionist de-Stalinization to rock the boat of the utopian party-state. There was no such tradition in the Nazi experience and no original, presumably humanist Holy Writ for disillusioned National Socialists to dream of resurrecting. Ian Kershaw, commenting on the failed attempt by Goebbels and Albert Speer to approach Hitler in 1943 on what they perceived as the endemic problems of the Nazi state (among which, at least for Goebbels, was the absence of radicalization of the home front), concluded unambiguously: “They were holding to the illusion that the regime was reformable, but that Hitler was unwilling to reform it. What they did not fully grasp was that the shapeless ‘system’ of governance that had emerged was both the inexorable product of Hitler's personalized rule and the guarantee of his pow
er.”68
In conclusion, the key distinction between these two horrendous projects of the twentieth century lies in revisionism or similar developments that simply could not be imagined or implemented under the Nazi regime. The Nazis had no humanist original project to invoke—no enlightened reservoir of betrayed libertarian hopes to be resurrected against the abominations of Hitlerism. A Khrushchev-style blow to Hitler's mystical cult is just not imaginable. The impact of Marxist revisionism and critical intellectuals can hardly be overestimated. The adventure of revisionism led Communist intellectuals beyond the system denounced as the cult of personality. Critical Marxism turned into post-Marxism, and even to liberal anti-Marxism. From within, true believers found Leninism wanting in its most powerful ambition, that of responding in a positively engaging way to the challenges of democratic modernity. As historian Vladimir Zubok argued, “The ethos of educated civic participation, resistance to the immorality of the communist regime, and belief in humane socialism was a feature common to the efforts of Russian, Polish, and Czech reformers and liberal-minded people of culture.”69 This growing common ground of civic empowerment and emancipation became most obvious in 1968 and later in the echoes of the dissident movement in Western Europe. Apostasy appeared once the ideological fanaticism of Communist regimes was denounced from within. Leninism, in contrast to Fascism, ultimately collapsed in Europe because it lost its quasi-religious, hierocratic credentials.
The Devil in History Page 3