4. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 24-29. See also Jules Monnerot, Sociology and Psychology of Communism, trans. Jane Degras and Richard Rees (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953).
5. For a similar position on the Stalinism-Nazism comparison, see Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, “Introduction. The Regimes and their Dictators: Perspectives of Comparison,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5.
6. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 380.
7. Peter Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996): p. 14.
8. George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 225-37.
9. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 36 and xi.
10. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) p. 554-55.
11. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 422.
12. Nolte elaborated his main theses in a controversial book published in German in 1997 that came out in French translation with a preface by Stéphane Courtois, La guerre civile européenne, 1917-1945: National-socialisme et bolchevisme (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000).
13. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 9-10.
14. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, trans. Jean Steinberg with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1970), p. 9.
15. Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 341.
16. Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalin’s Russia in Nazi Germany—Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 412. The two authors discuss this communality and shared experiences of Germany and Russia/USSR, but they insist that “there is no Berlin-Moscow connection without Rome, and no Russia-German discourse without Italian fascism. These were the sites of synchronized historical experience of an entire epoch [Synchronisierung von Epochenerfahrung]” (p. 421).
17. Deitrich Beyrau, “Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in “Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945,” special issue, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 426.
18. Raymond Aron quoted in Pierre Rigoulot and Ilios Yannakakis, Un pavé dans l’histoire: Le débat francais sur Le Livre Noir du communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), pp. 96-97.
19. On July 24, 1943, the Fascist Grand Council met for the first time since the beginning of the war. Its members voted 19-7 to request the king seek a policy more likely to save Italy from destruction. As Mussolini went to meet with the king, the Grand Council informed II Duce that Marshal Badoglio had been nominated prime minster and had the dictator arrested. Mussolini would later be freed by German paratroopers, but the ability of the supreme body of the National Fascist Party to depose Il Duce was in sharp contrast with the Nazi Party’s inability to get rid of Hitler, to overcome the Führer principle. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), pp. 593-99.
20. See the chapter “Losing All the Wars” in R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
21. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 181.
22. Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p. xxxvii.
23. Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 173
24. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 350.
25. Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth,’ p. 257.
26. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 132-36.
27. Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger Publishers, 2003), p. 138.
28. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 421.
29. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), pp. 156-57.
30. Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin—a Study in Twentieth-Century Patriotism (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002), pp. 160-62.
31. Gentile quotes the fascist catechism of 1939: “The DUCE, Benito Mussolini, is the creator of Fascism, the renewer of civil society, the Leader of the Italian people, the founder of the Empire.” In Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, pp. 137-38.
32. Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen, “The Political (Dis)Orders of Stalinism and National Socialism,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 85.
33. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 4.
34. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 506. In the first broadcast after his return to Italy (September 18, 1943), Mussolini announced that the new state would be “Fascist in a way that takes us back to our origins.”
35. Quoted in Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 56.
36. Norman Naimark, “Stalin and the Question of Genocide,” in Political Violence: Belief, Behavior, and Legitimation, ed. Paul Hollander (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 47; Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
37. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
38. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, pp. 261 and 224.
39. Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction: Legacies of Antifascism,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 14. Besides the articles from the special issue of the New German Critique that I quoted in this section, two others bring forth excellent insight about the anti-Fascism of Weimer Germany and of postwar Italy: Antonia Grunenberg, “Dichotomous Political Thought in Germany before 1933,” and Leonardo Paggi, “Antifascism and the Reshaping of Democratic Consensus in Post-1945 Italy,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996).