The problem is that most of the crimes are also crimes of national Communist regimes; that is to say, the gulag (I use the term here as a metaphor for all mass terror under Communism) is also a fratricide. Additionally, these regimes endured for more than a score of years, as they domesticized and entered into a post-totalitarian phase. How to measure accomplished lifetimes against stolen ones? One possible solution is to accept the fact that Leninism is radical evil, so that its crimes can be universally (or continentally) remembered and memorialized. This way, unilateral appropriation of trauma, ethnicization of terror, and collective silence can be prevented. Each individual case could maintain its specificities but would, at the same time, be part of a larger historical phenomenon, thus being assimilated to public consciousness. The authors of the Black Book condemned what they considered both an institutionalized and informal amnesia about the true nature of Communist regimes. Their accounts were supposed to provoke the necessary intimacy and ineffability for a sacralized memory of the gulag. Since then, some headway has been made along this path, but European identification with sites of its memory (in various countries) is still pending.123 We should not forget that in 2000, in Stockholm, during the international conference on the Holocaust (commemorating fifty-five years since the liberation of Auschwitz), the participants stated that “the normative basis of a transnational political community is defined by exposing and remembering inhuman barbarism, cruelty and unimaginable humiliation, which are unthinkable on the background of our collective existence.” To paraphrase Helmut Dubiel, the traumatic contemplation of absolute horror and of the total miscarriage of civility legitimizes an ethics that goes beyond the border of any individual state.124
To return to the Black Book, I wish to emphasize that the key point concerning its legacy is the legitimacy of the comparison between National Socialism and Leninism. I agree here with the Polish-French historian Krzysztof Pomian's approach:
It is undeniable that mass crimes did take place, as well as crimes against humanity, and this is the merit of the team that put together The Black Book: to have brought the debate regarding twentieth century communism into public discussion; in this respect, as a whole, beyond the reservations that one can hold concerning one page or another, it has played a remarkable role…. To say that the Soviets were worse because their system made more victims, or that the Nazis were worse because they exterminated the Jews, are two positions which are unacceptable, and the debate carried on under these terms is shocking and obscene.125
Indeed, the challenge is to avoid any “comparative trivialization,”126 or any form of competitive “martyrology” and to admit that, beyond the similarities, these extreme systems had unique features, including the rationalization of power, the definition of the enemy, and designated goals. The point, therefore, is to retrieve memory, to organize understanding of these experiments, and to try to make sense of their functioning, methods, and goals.
Some chapters of The Black Book succeed better than others, but as a whole the undertaking was justified. It was obviously not a neutral scholarly effort, but an attempt to comprehend some of the most haunting moral questions of our times: How was it possible for millions of individuals to enroll in revolutionary movements that aimed at the enslavement, exclusion, elimination, and finally extermination of whole categories of fellow human beings? What was the role of ideological hubris in these criminal practices? How could sophisticated intellectuals like the French poet Louis Aragon write odes to Stalin's secret police? How could Aragon believe in “the blue eyes of the revolution that burn with cruel necessity”? And how could the once acerbic critic of the Bolsheviks, the acclaimed proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, turn into an abject apologist for Stalinist pseudoscience, unabashedly calling for experiments on human beings: “Hundreds of human guinea pigs are required. This will be a true service to humanity, which will be far more important and useful than the extermination of tens of millions of healthy human beings for the comfort of a miserable, physically, psychologically, and morally degenerate class of predators and parasites.”127 The whole tragedy of Communism lies within this hallucinating statement: the vision of a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods, the denial of the right to life to those who are defined as “degenerate parasites and predators,” the deliberate dehumanization of the victims, and what Alain Besançon correctly identified as the ideological perversity at the heart of totalitarian thinking—the falsification of the idea of good (la falsification du bien).
I have strong reservations regarding theoretical distinctions on the basis of which some historians reach the conclusion that Communism is “more evil” than Nazism. In fact, they were both evil, even radically evil.128 Public awareness of Communist violence and terror has been delayed by the durability of Leninism's pretense of universality. Because of projection, it took a long time to achieve an agreement that Bolshevism was not another path to democracy and that its victims were overwhelmingly innocent.129 One cannot deny that Communism represented for many the only alternative (in my foreword I discuss a personal family example), especially with the rise of Fascism and of Hitler, at a time when liberal democracy seemed compromised.
Communism was consistently presented as synonymous with hope, but the dream turned into a nightmare: Communism “not only murdered millions, but also took away the hope.”130 Communism was founded upon “a version of a thirst for the sacred with a concomitant revulsion against the profane.” The Soviet “Great Experiment's master narrative involves the repurification or resacerdotalization of space.”131 This is why Furet, in his closing remarks to Passing of an Illusion, states that upon the moral and political collapse of Leninism we “are condemned to live in the world as it is” (p. 502). With a significantly stronger brush, Martin Malia argued that “any realistic account of communist crimes would effectively shut the door on Utopia; and too many good souls in this unjust world cannot abandon hope for an absolute end to inequality (and some less good souls will always offer them ‘rational’ curative nostrums). And so, all comrade-questers after historical truth should gird their loins for a very Long March indeed before Communism is accorded its fair share of absolute evil.”132 And, indeed, two important registers of criticism directed toward the process of revealing and remembering the crimes of Communist regimes were that of anti-anti-utopianism and anticapitalism. I will not dwell on the validity of counterpoising Communism with capitalism; it is a dead end. It just reproduces the original Manichean Marxist revolutionary ethos of the Communist Manifesto. It is endearing to a certain extent, for one's beliefs should be respected, but it is irrelevant if we seek to understand the tragedy of the twentieth century. The employment of anti-anti-utopianism in the discussion of left-wing totalitarianism is just another way of avoiding the truth. To reject the legitimacy of the comparison between National Socialism and Bolshevism on the basis of their distinct aims is utterly indecent and logically flawed. Ian Kershaw criticizes arguments based on the
different aims and intentions of Nazism and Bolshevism—aims which were wholly inhumane and negative in the former case and ultimately humane and positive in the latter case. The argument is based upon a deduction from the future (neither verifiable nor feasible) to the present, a procedure which in strict logic is not permissible…. The purely functional point that communist terror was “positive” because it was “directed towards a complete and radical change in society” whereas “fascist (i.e., Nazi) terror reached its highest point with the destruction of the Jews” and “made no attempt to alter human behavior or build a genuinely new society” is, apart from the debatable assertion in the last phrase, a cynical value judgment on the horrors of the Stalinist terror [my emphasis].133
Recognizing Communism as hope soaked in revolutionary utopia is truly a specter to turn away from. This hope materialized as radical evil can only lead to massacre, because “il cherche à s'incarner, et ce faisant, il ne peut faire autrement qu'éliminer ceux qui n'appartiennent pas
à la bonne classe sociale, ceux qui résistent à ce projet d'espoir [it looks to take flesh, and doing this, it can only eliminate those who do not belong to the right social class, those who resist this project of hope].”134 Ronald Suny was right in emphasizing that we should not forget that the original aspirations of socialism “were the emancipatory impulses of the Russian Revolution as well.”135 It is difficult to see how this affects the “duty of remembrance” regarding Leninism's crimes. Not to mention that, as early as 1918, with the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People, the Bolsheviks detailed their ideal of social justice into categories of disenfranchised people (lishentsy), the prototype taxonomy for the terror that was to follow in the later years.136 Tony Judt puts it bluntly: “The road to Communist hell was undoubtedly paved with good (Marxist) intentions. But so what? … From the point of view of the exiled, humiliated, tortured, maimed or murdered victims, of course, it's all the same.”137 Furthermore, such shameful commonalities between socialism and Bolshevism should actually be an incentive to call things by their real name when it comes to the radical evil that Communism in power was throughout the twentieth century. The hope that Bolshevism brought to so many was a lie. The full impact of the lie can only be measured by the nightmare of the millions it murdered. The moral and political bankruptcy of the “pure” original ideals cannot remain hidden just for the sake of safeguarding their pristine state. The uproar provoked by the Black Book indicated a “continuing reluctance to take at face value the overwhelming evidence of crimes committed by communist regimes.”138 So many years after the book's publication, some things have changed, but much more remains to be done. To return to Kołakowski's metaphor, the devil not only incarnated itself in history, it also wrecked our memory of it.
Beyond debates about how to remember, compare, and analyze Communism and Fascism, there is a bottom line that all can accept. Perhaps with minimal difficulty all can agree with Emilio Gentile's conclusion that “totalitarian experiments, even if they were imperfect and flawed, involved, conditioned, transformed, deformed and ended the existence of millions of human beings. In no uncertain terms, this was determined by the conviction of the principal protagonists that they were the forebears of a new humanity, the builders of a new civilization, the interpreters of a new truth, the repositories for the discrimination between good and evil, and the masters of the destinies of those caught up in their enterprise.”139 At the end of the day, reflecting on the “why” of the whole Communist experience, one needs to remember that Leninism emerged from the meeting between a certain direction of European revolutionary socialism, one that could in no way come to terms with the established liberal order and the rights of the individual, and the Russian tradition of conspiratorial violence. The mixture of revolutionary anticapitalism and ultranationalist German racism led to Hitler's chiliastic dreams of Aryan supremacy.140 At a speech in the Berlin Sports Palace on February 10, 1933, Hitler formulated with religious fervor his “predestined mission” to resurrect the German nation: “For I cannot divest of my faith in my people, cannot dissociate myself from the conviction that this nation will one day rise again, cannot divorce myself from my love for this, my people, and I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us will hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen.”141 Similarly, Mussolini confessed in My Autobiography that “I felt the deep need for an original conception capable of bringing about a more fruitful rhythm of history in a new period of history. It was necessary to lay the foundation of a new civilization.” Fascism for Mussolini was the solution to “the Spiritual Crisis of Italy.”142 The same frenzy for “a new temporality and nomos,” alternative and opposite to that of liberal modernity, was also at the core of Communism. Such a sense of mission was apparent at the Congress of Victors (the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in January-February 1934, as the Soviet regime entered the second five-year plan and finalized the Cultural Revolution, after Stalin had murdered, starved, and deported millions of kulaks in Ukraine and forcibly resettled several ethnic groups, and as he consolidated his position as undisputed leader of the Bolshevik party. At such a “glorious moment,” almost two and a half years before the beginning of the Great Terror, Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich praised Stalin as the creator “of the greatest revolution that human history has ever known.”143
The plight of Communism's millions of victims (many of whom had once espoused the generous promises of the Marxian doctrine) cannot be explained without reference to the Leninist party and its attempt to forcibly impose the will of a small group of fanatics over reticent and more often than not hostile populations. Mikhail Bakunin put it most aptly in an angry letter disavowing Sergey Nechaev's apotheosis of destructive violence and psychological terrorism: “Out of that cruel renunciation and extreme fanaticism you now want to make a general principle applicable to the whole community. You want crazy things, impossible things, the total negation of nature, man, and society!”144 Communism and Fascism believed that fundamental change was possible. They engineered radical revolutionary projects in order to answer this belief.145 However, they enacted their utopias with complete disregard for individual human life. Their frantic acceleration of human development engendered the materialization of radical evil in history.
CHAPTER 2
Diabolical Pedagogy and the (Il) logic of Stalinism
I am too busy defending innocents claiming their innocence to waste my time with guilty individuals claiming their guilt.
—Paul Éluard, refusing to sign a petition against the hanging of Czech surrealist poet Zàšvis Kalandra (in Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism)
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu died as a soldier serving his political ideals which he pursued through darkness, underground, and palaces, tenaciously, fiercely and fanatically.
—Petre Pandrea, Memoriile Mandarinului Valah (Memoirs of a Wallachian Mandarin)
With ascetic rigor towards itself and others, fanatical hatred for enemies and heretics, sectarian bigotry and an unlimited despotism fed on the awareness of its own infallibility, this monastic order labors to satisfy earthly, too “human” concerns.
—Semyon Frank, Vekhi (Landmarks)
It's not only the word “impossible” that has gone out of circulation, “unimaginable” also has no validity anymore.
—Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness
One of the main distinctions between the Nazi and Stalinist tyrannies was the absence in Germany of permanent purges of the ruling party elite as a mechanism of mobilization, integration, and scapegoating. In fact, Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek is right to observe that there were no Moscow-style show trials in Hitler's Germany (or for that matter in Mussolini's Italy).1 The explanation lies in the differences between the centrality of the charismatic party in Bolshevik regimes and the prevailing status of the leader in Fascist dictatorships. This is not say that the leader (whether Stalin, Mao, Mátyás Rákosi, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Klement Gottwald, or Enver Hoxha) was not an omnipotent figure under Leninism, but his cultic power derived from the apotheosis of the party as the carrier of history's behests. The absence of show trials in Nazi Germany did not eliminate purges as a means to consolidate the Führer's power.2 The Blomberg-Frisch affair, when Hitler entrenched his dominance over the army leadership, and the elimination of the Ernst Rohm SA faction during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, were, according to Ian Kershaw, “stepping-stones in cementing Hitler's absolute power.”3
In order to understand the dynamics of the Stalinist experiment in Eastern Europe, one must take into account the paramount role of direct Soviet intervention and intimidation.4 Local Communist formations were pursuing the Stalinist model of systematic destruction of non-Communist parties, the disintegration of the civil society, and the monopolistic oc
cupation of the public space through state-controlled ideological rituals and coercive institutions.5 The overall goal was to build a passive consensus based on unlimited commitment to the ideocratic political program of the ruling elite. The true content of the political regime was described by the “cult of personality.” Stalin, as the Egocrat (to use Solzhenitsyn's term), was the ultimate figure of power. Echoing earlier critiques of the Leninist vertical-authoritarian logic by Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, French political philosopher Claude Lefort points out that this principle presupposed a specific “logic of identification”: “Identification of the people with the proletariat, of the proletariat with the party, of the party with the leadership, of the leadership with the Egocrat…. The denial of social division goes hand in hand with the denial of a symbolic distinction which is constitutive of society.”6 The personalization of political power, its concentration in the hands of a demigod, led to his forcible religious adoration and the masochistic humiliation of its subjects. British journalist George Urban described this system as “a paranoia of despotism” that boasted its own (il) logic. It looks now and did then “like a form of madness to us, observing it as we are from the outside, but did not seem so to anyone identifying himself with the context in which Stalin operated. Within that context Stalin pursued his objectives relentlessly and rationally.”7 In the context of such absolute inversion of the life-world, Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin's letter to Stalin on December 10, 1937, a few months before his public trial and execution as an “enemy of the people” in March 1938, can make sense. Bukharin, like Karl Radek, another Bolshevik luminary, was the prototype of the character Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's masterpiece Darkness at Noon (it was Radek who spoke of the “algebra of confession”).8 As historians J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov point out, “According to Stalin's formula, criticism was the same as opposition; opposition inevitably implied conspiracy; conspiracy meant treason. Algebraically, therefore, the slightest opposition to the regime or failure to report such opposition was tantamount to terrorism.”9
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