66. Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell,” New York Times, December 22, 1997, A27.
67. See Rigoulot and Yannakakis, Un pavé dans l’histoire.
68. Personal conversation with Annette Wieworka, Washington, D.C., November 13, 2010. I also discussed extensively these issues with Stephane Courtois at the Sighet, Romania, Summer School on the “Memory of Communism,” June 2009.
69. Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 402 and 406.
70. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 462.
71. Christopher R. Browning and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Frameworks for Social Engineering. Stalinist Schema of Identification and the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 262.
72. Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key: The Communist Case of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 175.
73. See Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell.” Amir Weiner also makes an excellent point on this issue: “When Stalin’s successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death [concentration] camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution.” See Amir Weiner’s review of the Black Book of Communism in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 450-52.
74. Ian Kershaw, “Reflections on Genocide and Modernity,” in In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 381-82.
75. Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45, p. 470.
76. Stéphane Courtois, “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” in The Black Book, p. 23.
77. Jeffrey Herf, “Unjustifiable Means,” Washington Post, January 23, 2000, pp. X09. Herf, however, adds an important caveat to his argument (one stressed by other scholars discussing the Black Book): the crimes of Communism were a constant focus of scholarship and of official discourse during the Cold War, while the Holocaust intensively preoccupied academia and the public only starting in the 1970s.
78. Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” p. 41.
79. “Vilnius declaration of the OSCE parliamentary assembly and resolutions adopted at the eighteenth annual session” (Vilnius, June 29 to July 3, 2009), http://www.oscepa.org/images/stories/documents/activities/1.Annual%20Session/2009_Vilnius/Final_Vilnius_Declaration_ENG.pdf. The Prague Declaration and the OSCE Resolution are hardly singular. Other official, pan-European or trans-Atlantic documents have been made to condemn the criminality of Communism and Stalinism following the example of the criminalization of Fascism and Nazism, for example, the EU Parliament resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism or the building of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. This monument was dedicated by President George W. Bush on Tuesday, June 12, 2007. June 12 was chosen because it was the twentieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s famous Brandenburg Gate speech. See http://www.globalmuseumoncommunism.org/voc.
80. Quoted in Carolyn J. Dean, “Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and ‘Exorbitant’ Jewish Memory,” History and Memory 18, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2006): 43-85. Though I disagree with Carolyn Dean’s conclusions regarding authors such as Furet, Courtois, Besançon, and Todorov, I think her detailed presentation of the French debate on “which is more evil, Communism or Nazism” shows the intrinsic fallacy of such an argumentation: it is a dead end knowledge-wise, for any resolution on the topic will always be partisan.
81. Ibid., p. 73.
82. For recent analysis of the fate of the Black Book of Nazi Crimes against the Soviet Jews, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
83. Igal Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 6.
84. Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, “State Violence—Violent Societies,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 213.
85. Eric D. Weitz, “On Certainties and Ambivalences: Reply to My Critics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 63. See the other contributions to the debate stirred by Weitz’s initial article: Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1-29. He received replies from Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 30-43; Amir Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 44-53; and Alaina Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 54-61. Peter Fritzsche offered, later on, interesting responses to Weitz’s approach in “Genocide and Global Discourse,” German History 23, no. 1 (2005): 96-111.
86. Halfin, “Introduction,” in Language and Revolution, p. 5.
87. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship, More or Less Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 487-528; and Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). Alexopoulos’s research leads us to a conclusion similar to Jowitt’s: “The practice of giving and taking rights for political purposes produced a highly fragmented society where individuals experienced different and unstable states of civic belonging” (p. 490). Similarly, Jowitt argued that “the critical issue facing Leninist regimes was citizenship. The political individuation of an article potential citizenry treated contemptuously by an inclusive (not democratic), neotraditional (not modernized) Leninist polity was the cause of Leninist breakdown.” Ken Jowitt, “Weber, Trotsky and Holmes on the Study of Leninist Regimes,” Journal of International Affairs (2001): 44.