The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  In 1945, chief ideologue Andrei Zhdanov criticized automatic purges based on class origin: “The ‘biological’ approach to people is very widespread among us, when the existence of some not entirely ‘convenient’ relatives or other, frequently long dead, is made a criterion of the political loyalty of a worker. Such ‘biologists,’ producing their distinctive theory of ‘inheritance,’ try to look at living communists through a magnifying glass.” Even Stalin, in the statement signaling his retreat from the Great Terror, admitted in 1938 the practice of indiscriminate mass purges (which at the time had harrowing consequences for those subjected to them): “It is time to understand that Bolshevik vigilance consists in essence in the ability to unmask the enemy regardless of how clever and cunning he may be, irrespective of how he adorns himself, and not in indiscriminate or ‘on the off-chance’ expulsions [from the party], by the tens and hundreds, of everyone who comes within reach.”93 The very notion of revolutionary vigilance treaded a thin line between exclusion and physical elimination. At the point of the radicalization of revolutionary utopia in action, the obsession of Lenin and Stalin (and for that matter other Communist dictators) with cleaning and purifying the “human garden,” Communism's focus on excision, transmogrified into extermination.94

  ARGUMENTS FOR COMPARISONS

  As a matter of principle, the comparison between Nazism and Communism strikes me as both morally and scholarly justifiable, at least because we can see enough similar as well as dissimilar elements to justify such a comparison. To deny this comparison (which after all inspired one of the great works of political and moral philosophy of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, and was developed not by right-wingers but by such democratic socialists as the Mensheviks) is a proof of self-imposed intellectual narrow-mindedness.95 Michael Scammell emphasized that “we cannot choose between our memory of Auschwitz and our memory of the Gulag, because history has mandated that we remember them both.”96 Scholars are not judges, and the confusion between these two roles can make some scholars oblivious to important distinctions. Comparison serves the work of understanding when it is used to highlight both similarities and differences.

  François Furet insisted in his correspondence with Ernst Nolte that there is something absolutely evil in Nazi practice, both at the level of original intention and the implementation of Utopian goals. This is not to minimize in any way the abominations of Communism, but simply to recognize that, comparable as the two mass horrors are, there is something truly singular about the Holocaust and the manic perfection and single-mindedness of the Nazi Final Solution. Nazi ideology was founded upon what historian Enzo Traverso called “redemptive violence.” Its ethos merges anti-Semitism with “a ‘religion of nature’ based on blind faith in biological determinism to the point where genocide itself came to represent both ‘a disinfection, a purification—in short an ecological measure’ and a ritual act of sacrifice performed to redeem history from chaos and decadence [my emphasis].”97

  In the case of the Soviet Union, after the war on the peasants, the Stalinist repressive machine, especially during the Great Terror, attacked all social strata. This form of repression had a distinctive volatile and unpredictable character. Hysteria was universal and unstoppable. Any citizen could be targeted. From this point of view, one could argue that Stalinist terror was more inclusive, amorphous, but also porous because it represents both “the extreme penalization of types of social behavior” and victimization based on “political-ideological standards for rooting out deviant language and ‘bad’ class origins.”98 Starting with Lenin and worsening with Stalin, the comprehensive grasp of state violence in the USSR revealed “an instant readiness to declare war on the rest of society” (as Scammel says). The result was that, according to Nicolas Werth, one in five adult males passed through the gulag. Here, one should also keep in mind the post-1945 campaign against “female thieves” (in reality war widows) or the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility to twelve in 1935.

  In Nazi Germany terror was unleashed mainly against minorities (Jews, Roma, the disabled, or gays) and foreign populations. In the Soviet Union, terror brought about two worlds: the Soviet social body, made up of politically validated people, and the gulag, with the party and its repressive institutions mediating between the two realms. While in Nazi Germany the regime sought “its victims mainly outside the Volksgemeinschaft, the Soviet populace was the main victim of its own regime.” In other words, the war conducted by Stalin and the Leninist parties was internal, “a catastrophe ostensibly launched as a social upheaval, appropriating the idiom of class struggle and civil war.”99 Along similar lines, Richard Overy provides an excellent definition of the gulag, which in his view “symbolizes the political corruption and hypocrisy of a regime formally committed to human progress, but capable of enslaving millions in the process.”100 The state-building Stalinist blueprint, the one that became the core of the “civilizational transfer” implied by exporting revolution or Sovietization, was “dialectically” bent on purification and inclusiveness. This paradox is best expressed by the contrast between the 1936 constitution's description of a society made up of “non-antagonistic classes” and Stalin's November 1937 call for eradicating not just the enemies of the people but also their “kith and kin.”101

  One can conclude that, in the Soviet Union at different stages, certain groups were indeed designated targets, but the exercise of terror applied to individuals of all social origins (workers, peasants, intellectuals, party and military cadres, former middle and high bourgeois, priests, even secret police officials). Soviet terror had a distinctly random character, for its sole purpose was the building of Communism through the total homogenization of society. Its rationale was the moral-political unity of the community. From this point of view, the violence inflicted on the population was ideologically functionalized. It never achieved the industrial scope of the Holocaust. It was, however, an end in itself. It was the other face of the Bolshevik regime's “modern agenda of subjectiviztion.” Those individuals who failed to become “conscious citizens engaged in the program of building socialism of their own will,” those who failed to understand their obligations as members of “the first socialist state,” those who erred in revolutionary vigilance, in other words “the failed hermeneuticists” of the great leap out of the empire of necessity became excess to the needs of the Soviet state. The Bolsheviks were interested in refashioning the human soul. The life of the individual could make sense only if it immersed itself in the “general stream of life” of the Soviet collective.102 It is no surprise that, as Orlando Figes remarks, the Russian word for conscience (sovest') as a private dialogue with the inner self almost disappeared from official use after 1917. On October 26, 1932, Stalin described the full nature of the Bolshevik transformation: “Your tanks will be worth nothing if the soul (dusha) in them is rotten. No, the ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”103

  In the summer of 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, the output of the Bolshevik industry of souls was already on display: over 40,000 participants gathered for a physical culture parade on the Red Square entitled “The Parade of the Powerful Stalin Breed [plemia]” (my emphasis). At the end of the celebrations of the first decade of the existence of Fascist Italy, the newspaper Gioventù fascista gave an almost archetypical description of the totalitarian body politic: “With Fascism, a crowd has become a harmony of souls, a perfect fit of citizens actively participating in the great life of the State…. [T]his was a crowd with self-knowledge, aware of its obedience, its faith, and its fighting mettle, a crowd serene and secure, trusting in its Leader, in a State…. This was no faceless throng, but an image given shape and order by spirits educated in the epic of these new times; not an amorphous mass, but an amalgam of fresh values and intelligence.”104 The imagery employed by the Italian journalists would have surely been fitting for the rows of thousands of Soviet New Men and Women participating in the pa
rade of the “powerful Stalin breed,” expressing the joy of these crowds celebrating their happiness and fortune to be offspring of utopia made reality under the guidance of the beloved Helmsman (Vozhd). What is striking in the passage, from the point of view of our discussion of Fascism and Communism, is the constancy of the signified despite the interchangeability of the key signifiers.

  Even when it did not take on a directly exterminist profile (e.g., mass executions, death marches, and state-engineered starvation), Soviet terror took the form of forced labor whose economic utility was highly questionable. I disagree with Dan Diner on this point, for I consider that forced labor in the gulag had a primarily pedagogical and corrective character. In both Nazism and Stalinism, the camps fundamentally served an ideological function; all other aspects that could be assigned to them were epiphenomena to the ideological driving force of the two dictatorships.105 In the Soviet Union, the labor camps were “a cultural model,” a “peculiar wedding of discipline and representation,” which ensured that those inside would be trained and those outside terrorized. Most importantly, this negative model of organization within the Communist space was employed for the structuring and disciplining of even positive social milieus, such as factories and universities.106 Until 1956, the gulag was the blueprint of human management in the USSR. As Orlando Figes notes, it was “more than a source of labor for building projects like the White Sea Canal. It was itself a form of industrialization.”107 I would go even further: the gulag was the normative design at the basis of the Communist project of modernity, the original source of the misdevelopment brought about by all Soviet-type regimes.

  Exploitation by the state had, indeed, its productive purpose, but it was a consequence and an extension of the institution of the camp and deportation site as places of anthropological transformation. It is true that “the Final Solution was a project annulling even what are broadly considered universally valid standards of self-preservation.”108 But I think it is misguided to force upon Communist terror qualifications on the basis of circumstances and utility while ignoring its purifying and standardizing motifs.109 To paraphrase Timothy Snyder, Stalinism's project of self-colonization by mass terror was founded upon the indifference to individual human life. Stalinism and Nazism's terror were “built into the world view of each dictator and each dictatorship; it was essential to the system, not a mere instrument of control, and it was practiced at every level of society.”110 Under Communism mass murder became a certainty because of the inevitable violence resulting from the corroboration of the principle of the state (gosudarstvennost) and the struggle to create order out of what Leninist leaders perceived as stikhiinost, social chaos.111

  Moreover, Timothy Snyder warns that if we single-mindedly focus on Auschwitz and the gulag, “we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.”112 Snyder, while stressing the singularity of Nazi atrocities, demonstrates what he calls “the absence of economics”: “Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational…. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic development. If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality [my emphasis].”113 In Bloodlands Snyder takes his point further. He argues, in his reassessment of the monstrous chasm generated by the exterminist policies of Stalinism and Nazism, for a revision of our premises for comprehending such cataclysm: “Fourteen million people were deliberately murdered by two regimes over twelve years. This is the moment that we have scarcely begun to understand let alone master.”114 During the twentieth century, “history had truly become a delinquent.”115 Snyder is right: the only solution to this pathology of modernity is “the ethical commitment to the individual.” This is also the fundamental lesson of the revolutions of 1989, the legacy of dissidents like Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Patočka, Václav Havel, Jacek Kuroń, Bronisław Geremek, Adam Michnik, János Kis, and George Konrád. That is exactly why I consider the revolutions of 1989 the endpoint of the historical era ruled by utopia.

  The most important conclusion to draw from the comparison of terror dynamics in the two cases is that both regimes (radical Leninism or Stalinism and Nazism) were genocidal. Norman Naimark excellently describes this reality: “The two great tyrannies of the twentieth century simply share too much in common to reject out of hand attempts to classify and order them in the history of political systems and genocide.”116 Analytical distinctions between them are certainly important, but their common contempt for the bourgeois state of law, human rights, and the universality of humankind, regardless of spurious race and class distinctions, is in my view beyond doubt. Any student of the “age of extremes” would have to acknowledge that Leninism contained all the political and ideological ingredients of the totalitarian order (the party's monopoly on power, ideological uniformity and regimentation, censorship, demonization of the “people's enemy,” a besieged fortress mentality, secret police terror, concentration camps, and, no less important, the obsession with shaping the “New Man”). To paraphrase Dan Diner, Communism and National Socialism, because of the terrible crimes they committed, “embedded themselves in the memory of the twentieth century as twins of terror.”117

  For totalitarian experiments to be successful, terror and ideology are mandatory instruments for exerting power. A statement by Boris Souvarine, the author of a path-breaking and still impressively valid biography of Stalin published in the mid-1930s, perfectly encapsulates the convergent nature of Communism and Fascism: “In the early years of the Russian Revolution, it was easy to put everything down to the idea of ‘Slavic soul'; yet the events that were reputed to be exclusively Slavic phenomena have subsequently been witnessed in Italy and Germany. When the beast in man is unleashed, the same consequences are visible everywhere, irrespective of whether the man in question is Latin, German, or Slav, however different he may appear on the surface.”118 The cold pathological rationality of the Nazi war on the Jews, including the use of mass murder technologies at Auschwitz and the other death factories, could not be anticipated by the Marxist apostate Boris Souvarine in this diagnosis written in 1937. Nevertheless, he was right in regarding the strange blending of barbarism and derailed modernity in the ideological despotisms of the extreme Left and Right.

  Again, comparing the two absolute disgraces of the twentieth century, the gulag and the Holocaust, often leads to misunderstandings and injured feelings among victims of one or another of these monstrosities. This is regrettable because, in all fairness, none of these experiences will ever be remembered enough. Yes, as Alain Besançon points out, there is a kind of amnesia regarding the Communist crimes, just as there is a hypermnesia in relation to the Shoah.119 But as the French historian shows, this is not because there is an attempt by one group to monopolize the memory of suffering in the twentieth century. The origins of this phenomenon are to be sought after in the fact that Communism was often regarded as progressive, anti-imperialist, and, more important still, anti-Fascist. Communism knew how to pose as the heir to the Enlightenment, and many were duped by this rationalistic and humanistic pretense. So, in my view, the research agenda initially suggested by The Black Book presupposed a rethinking not only of Communism and Fascism but also of their opposites, anti-Fascism and anti-Communism. In other words, not all those who resisted Hitler were friends of democracy, and not all those who rebelled against Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Castro were bona fide liberals. The Black Book forced many in France, Germany, the United States, and, if it need be recalled, East-Central Europe to admit that those “who told of the marvels of the S
oviet Union served to legitimize the massacre of millions…. [They] fooled their own societies into seeing the millions of corpses as a great promise for a better future.”120 The uproar caused by The Black Book helped bring to the fore the need both for remembrance of Communism's crimes and for reassessment of the massive killing and dying perpetrated by so many regimes in the name of this ideology with the endorsement of those who preferred to keep their eyes and ears firmly shut.121

  As far as the anamnesis of Leninist violence, one fundamental problem is that the subjects of trauma mostly belong to social categories rather than national, ethnic ones (as in the case of the Holocaust). This issue is directly connected with the difference discussed above: Communism was at war with its own society. Even under its most moderate avatars (Kádár's Hungary, Gorbachev's USSR, or contemporary China), when a section of society threatened the existence of the system, the repressive (quasi-terroristic) levers were activated to isolate and extirpate the “pest hole.” Under the circumstances, Diner's framing of the dilemma is noteworthy: “The memory of ‘sociocide,’ class murder, is archived, not transmitted from one generation to another as is the case with genocide…. How can crimes that elude the armature of an ethnic, and thus long-term, memory be kept alive in collective remembrance? Can crimes perpetrated not in the name of a collective, such as the nation, but in the name of a social construction, such as class, be memorialized in an appropriate form?”122 It was often the case that such a query was solved through the artificial creation of “ethnic armature.” In the former Soviet bloc, Communism was sold as mainly a Russian import, while local leaders fell into a vaguely defined category of collaborators or “elements foreign to the nation.” It was just a step from the last coinage to the rejuvenation of the old specter of Zydokomuna. But the crux of the problem is that, despite the efforts of Courtois and the other authors of the Black Book, a unitary death tool might be possible but a collective, transnational memory of Communism's crimes does not exist. In the early twenty-first century, through the various pan-European documents that have been adopted by the European Union or the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the first steps in this direction have been made. The Leninist experiment (that is, the world Communist movement) dissolved into national narratives of trauma and guilt upon the ideology's extinction. Terror and mass murder seem to still keep Communist states separated in terms of both memory and history. And considerable challenges remain in integrating the massive trauma caused by Communist regimes into what we call today European history.