40. Dan Diner and Christian Gundermann, “On the Ideology of Antifascism,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 123-32.
41. Geoff Eley, “Legacies of Antifascism: Constructing Democracy in Postwar Europe,” in “Legacies of Antifascism,” special issue, New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 75 and 81.
42. For an illuminating study on this topic, see Ekaterina Nikova, “Bulgarian Stalinism Revisited,” in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2009).
43. Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 38-42.
44. Kołakowski, Main Currents, p. 885. For the latest account of the “philosophy debate” and of the post-1945 ideological offensive against science in the USSR, see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). For Zhdanovism (its origins, nature, and impact), see Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 (Montreaclass="underline" McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). Boterbloem shows how the cultural wars of 1946-48 were “dress rehearsed” as early as 1940 (pp. 210-13). Between 1945 and 1947, there was no attempt by Stalin to liberalize or reform the regime (despite the populace’s expectations and signals along these lines within the Politburo). On the contrary, during those years there was continuity with the prewar situation and a noticeable radicalization by means of the reignition of the politics of purge. See Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953 (New York: Praeger, 1996); and Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
45. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 436-37; and Richard Overy’s review of this book, “A World Built on Slavery,” Daily Telegraph, May 20, 2003.
46. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 328.
47. For a telling account of the paradoxes and pitfalls of the European anti-Fascist Left in the aftermath of the Second World War, see Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
48. Quoted in Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 232.
49. Michael Burleigh called this practice an act of indulging in “vicarious utopianism.”
50. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1992), p. 75.
51. Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction,” p. 17. I do agree with Henri Rousso’s rebuke of those who consider that anti-Fascism has run its historical course and argue that it is not relevant for the analysis of recent history. The absence of an identifiable adversary does not preclude the danger of totalitarian repeat or seduction. Having anti-Fascism and anti-Communism as inherent facets of European culture is crucial in learning from and avoiding the last century’s ideological hubris. Rousso argues that “[to the position] that antifascism continues to prosper despite the fact that its target disappeared more than a half century ago, we could reply that anti-communism finds itself in an identical situation today, for while there is no real adversary, there is nevertheless a temptation to create one out of whole cloth.” Henry Rousso, “Introduction: The Legitimacy of an Empirical Comparison,” in Stalinism and Nazism, p. 5.
52. See Marcel Gauchet, A l’épreuve des totalitarismes (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
53. Martin Malia, “Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity,” in Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Mark Kramer, trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. xvii. Courtois and several collaborators put together a follow-up to the Livre Noir, Du passé nous faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire du communisme en Europe (Paris: Laffont, 2002).
54. For an insightful approach to ideological despotisms, see Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994). I examined the relationship between ideology and terror in Leninist regimes in my book The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Daniel Chirot’s review essay on The Black Book can be found in East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 3 (Fall 2000).
55. V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), p. 11.
56. Vyshinsky quoted in Stéphane Courtois, in “Crimes, Terror, Repression,” his conclusion to The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 750.
57. For this argument and Arendt’s quote, see Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (1997): 338.
58. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
59. Andrei Oisteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006).
60. E. A. Rees Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin Revolutionary Machiavellism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 99.
61. Fyodor Dostoyevski, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, intro. Joseph Frank (New York: Knopf, 2000). One of the characters in the novel became the symbol of a mentality often referred to as shigalyovshchina, described by noted Dostoyevsky scholar Joseph Frank as “social-political demagogy and posturing with a tendency to propose extreme measures and total solutions” (p. 727). Needless to add, for many critics of Bolshevism, Lenin was an emblematic exponent of this mindset.
62. E. A. Rees, Political Thought, p. 132.
63. Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics,” p. 52.
64. Michael Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” New Republic, December 20, 1999, p. 41.
65. I am responding here to some observations made by Hiroaki Kuromiya in his review article “Communism and Terror,” Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 1 (January 2001): 191-201. I consider that his conclusion that “the issue of terror will remain important, it will no doubt be studied merely as part (if a central part) of a larger episode in world history” needs one caveat. Communism is indeed part of a larger framework in world history, that of the ascendance of radical evil, in our times as man fell victim to statolatry (Luigi Sturzo), when the ends superseded any considerations about the means, when human beings became superfluous. Communism did generate consequences not produced by any other revolution or terror, besides the Fascist one. This is a point consistently overlooked in other reactions to the Black Book, such as Ronald Grigor Suny, “Obituary or Autopsy? Historians Look at Russia/USSR in the Short Twentieth Century,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 303-19; or Ronald Aronson, “Communism’s Posthumous Trial,” History and Theory 42, no. 2 (May 2003): 222-45. One can try and situate in the same category the genocide in Rwanda and that in Ukraine (as Aronson does), just for the sake of a Manichean capitalism versus Communism polarity, but it is hardly knowledge-productive. One can argue about terror as an epiphenomenon of specific historical circumstances (civil war, famine, capitalist offensive, etc., as Suny does), but the criminal nature of the Soviet regime lay bare from its inception (e.g., in the RFSR 1918 Constitution).