Recenzie la "Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe" de Robert Gellately (New York: Knopf, 2007)

For Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, 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.”[1] Both movements pretended to purify humanity of any agents of decadence and dissolution. For the Communists, the enemy 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. Both party-movements execrated and denounced  liberalism, democracy, parliamentarianism as degradations of true politics, one that would transcend any divisions through the establishment of perfect communities (classless or racially unified). Fundamentally atheistic, both Communism and Fascism organized their political objectives in discourses of alleged emancipation, political religions meant to deliver the individual from the impositions of traditional morality and legality.

Psychological and psychopathological explanations for these uniquely murderous regimes are not sufficient: whereas Stalin and Hitler were incontrovertibly 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 Nikolay Berdiaev saw Lenin as a paradoxical personality, an anti-democratic, neo-Jacobin revolutionary, yet a humane individual, animated by a thirst for equality and even a passion for freedom. In the growing body of literature dealing with the two totalitarian experiences of the 20th century, Robert Gellately’s masterful study stands out as uniquely original, insightful, and provocative. An expert on the relationship between the Gestapo and German society, the author understands and explains the multiple connections (complicities, inclusion mechanisms) that created a regime based on a strange yet undeniable consensus. Going beyond the already established comparisons between Hitler and Stalin, the author brings Lenin intro the story as the true architect of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the real founder of the Gulag system, an entranced 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.  Endorsing the book, Richard Pipes insists that unlike so many other historians, Gellately places Lenin “alongside Stalin and Hitler as a founder of modern barbarism.”

Ideological fanaticism mixed with all-consuming resentment explains Lenin’s destructive ambitions. Lenin was not only the founder of political propaganda, the supreme priest of a new ecclesiology 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”.[2] 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 de-humanized enemy.[3] Gellately’s quotes one of Hitler’s secretaries’ recollections: “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.” [4] Gellately reconstructs the dynamics of these regimes and insists on the centrality of the leaders’ objectives in their functioning. Bolshevism cannot be understood without admitting Lenin’s paramount role. Stalin was indeed the beneficiary of a system that Lenin had imagined and developed.  Together with other authors who have dwelled on these topics, he regards ideology as the key issue.[5] In the absence of ideology, these regimes would have remained traditional tyrannies. It was the ideological pretense that made Lenin engage in his reckless attempt to radically transform society. In his footsteps, Stalin pursued the same all-transforming agenda: nature, science, language had all to be subordinated to the sacrosanct goal. The same ideological ardor, impervious to any doubt or self-questioning motivated Hitler’s delusional visions of global race warfare.[6] As Arthur Koestler demonstrated long ago, totalitarian movements disregard ethics and despise moral absolutes: “Since aboput 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 crush.”[7] Neither Marxism, nor Fascism could include in their theoretical body an ethical component. Communism was morally sterilized or, in the words of Steven Lukes, it suffered of moral blindness.[8] The same can be said about Fascism with its exaltation of the primeval tribal virtues and total disregard for the common humanity of the all human beings.

The real similarities between the communist and fascist experiments (the crucial role of the party, the pre-eminence the ideology, the ubiquitous secret police, the fascination with technology, the frantic cult of the “New Man”, the quasi-religious celebration of the charismatic Leader) should not blur significant distinctions (one of them being the absence of Nazi show trials or intra-party permanent purges). On the one hand, both Stalinism and Nazism looked for “objective enemies” and operated with notions of collective, even gen4etical 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 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 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!”)”[9] On the other hand, the party apparatus never played as powerful a role in Nazi Germany as it did in Stalin’s Russia. As Gellately notices, Hitler envied Stalin for having been able to place political officers as ideological watchdogs in the army.  When he maintained that 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 the success of our cause.  They don’t try to climb above their station, you don’t even notice them.... Generals can do nothing without a officer corps.”[10] True, Lenin was not the embodiment of the party bureaucracy  In this respect, Gellately draws fine and necessary distinctions: during the Great Terror, Bolshevism created a sense of universal fear among all strata of the population. The Leninist project, exacerbated 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.[11] Nazism singled out certain categories, primarily the Jews, as inimical to the revolutionary project and therefore destined to extermination.

The three main characters of the book are individuals who saw themselves as custodians of sacred creeds. Indeed, one cannot insist enough: ideology is the key for understanding the nature of those regimes. In this respect, Gellately agrees with Solzenitsyn who explained the uniquely intense murderous drive of Sovietism through the ideological ingredient.

The main problem that needs to examined is the link between these systems beyond the short-lived moments of cooperation (e.g. after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). We know that there are scholars who still resist the very idea of a comparison between Communism and Fascism. This would diminish the uniqueness of the absolute horror symbolized by the Holocaust and would overlook the fact that ideological intentions were significantly different between the communist and the Fascist, or better said, Nazi project. Still, they were both revolutionary ideologies/movements, meant to destroy the status quo (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 out of racial particularism. Lenin did not nourish xenophobic propensities, but Stalin did. At the end of his life, he 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.

Gellately uses an enormous amount of scholarly and archival material to document the genocidal nature of these regimes. 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. For Lenin, class struggle was the ultimate justification for the ruthless persecutions of aristocrats, priests, wealthy peasants etc. The demonization of the enemy started basically with Lenin, as clearly exposed by Gellately in agreement with Richard Pipes. This does not mean that Nazism was simply a response to Bolshevism, a panic-ridden reaction to an external cause. The ideological roots of Hitler’s politics were endogenous. There was a proto-Fascist tradition in Germany as well as in France (as Zeev Sternhell has shown). Still, at a certain moment, Stalinism incorporated the motifs and symbols of the ultra-nationalist right and became, as Alexander Yakovlev and Robert C. Tucker have argued, a“Bolshevism of the extreme right.”[12] In this respect, Gellately’s book would have benefited from an analysis of the role of anti-Semitism within Soviet Marxism.  This was not simply the expression of Stalin’s idiosyncrasies. Zhadanovism (the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns), the secret pogrom of the early 1950s, the Slansky affair, were part and parcel of the (i)logic of  mature Stalinism.[13] Ironically, they represented a victory of sorts of 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.” [14]

To conclude: it is not possible anymore to maintain and defend the image of a relatively benign Lenin whose ideas were viciously distorted by a sociopath named Stalin. In fact, as Gellately bluntly and unequivocally repudiates any apologetic approach to Lenin. He portrays 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.”[15] Furthermore, it is hard not to agree with the author 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 per haps above all by his ferocity.”[16] 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 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.  In my view, here lies the capital distinction between the two horrendous experiences.

Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park), former editor of East European Politics and Societies (1998-2004), author of numerous books including Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton UP, 1998), Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (University of California Press, 2003), and co-editor of World Order after Leninism (University of Washington Press, 2006).  In 2008-2009, he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where he completes a book on Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice: Romania Confronts Its Communist Past.