117. Dan Diner, Cataclysms, p. 90.
118. Souvarine (sometimes spelled Suvarin), quoted in The Black Book, 296.
119. See his profound book Le malheur du siècle: Sur le communisme, le nazisme et l’unicité de la Shoah (Paris: Fayard, 1998).
120. Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 287.
121. I am paraphrasing Bartov. He gives a commendable portrait of the dogmatic mind: “One had to lie blatantly and consistently to oneself and one’s society to make Bolshevism palatable.” Ibid., p. 286.
122. Dan Diner, “Remembrance and Knowledge: Nationalism and Stalinism in Comparative Discourse,” in The Lesser Eviclass="underline" Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 86-87.
123. For an excellent discussion on the differences between the gulag and the Holocaust and the process by which the latter’s memory has been sacralized, see Gabriel Motzkin, “The Memory of Crime and the Formation of Identity,” in The Lesser Evil, ed. Dubiel and Motzkin.
124. Helmut Dubiel, “The Remembrance of the Holocaust as a Catalyst for a Transnational Ethnic?” in “Taboo, Trauma, Holocaust,” special issue, New German Critique 90 (Autumn 2003): 59-70.
125. See Krzystof Pomian, “Communisme et nazisme: Les tragédies du siecle,” L’Histoire (July-August 1998): 100-105. For a similar view, see Michael Scammel’s review of The Black Book. In his review, Scammell notices that, in the American edition, some chapters lack bibliographies. In fact, at least in the case of the chapter dealing with Central and South-East Europe, authored by Karel Bartosek, the French edition included a list of further readings that was strangely deleted from the American translation. Indeed, one of my own books published in Romanian in 1996 was mentioned in Bartosek’s bibliography (Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej, Bucharest, 1995).
126. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). He defines comparative trivialization thus: “At its heart lies the device of acknowledging Nazi atrocities but, as it were, ‘humanizing’ them by pointing, indignantly, at crimes committed by others—crimes presumably as vicious as those perpetrated in the Third Reich… its historical function is to cover the special horror of German barbarity between 1933 and 1945, and to divert attention from studying barbarity in its own—that is to say, its German context” (pp. xi-xiv).
127. Quoted by Stéphane Courtois in his conclusion to The Black Book, p. 751.
128. I don’t share philosopher Avishai Margalit’s view that the ideological premises of Communism, universalistic and humanist at least in the Marxism texts, would make the application of the radical evil concept inaccurate. But Margalit’s analysis of the differences between opportunistic and principled compromises remains illuminatingly useful. See his book On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
129. Alain Besançon, “Mémoire et oubli du communisme,” Commentaire, no. 80 (Winter 1997-98): 789-93. The essay was translated as “Forgotten Communism” in the American journal Commentary 105, no. 1 (January 1998): 24-27.
130. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 295.
131. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 2-3.
132. Martin Malia, “Foreword,” in The Black Book, ed. Stéphane Courtois, p. xx.
133. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship—Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000), pp. 36-38.
134. Lawrence Olivier, Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 33, no. 2 (June 2000): p. 399.
135. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Obituary or Autopsy?” p. 319.
136. Igal Halfin lists the categories defined by Chapter 13 of the Declaration: “(1) The so-called former people (byvshie liudi)—primarily religious functionaries and employees of the tsarist police and military; (2) class aliens—landowners, individuals who lived off unearned income, exploiters, private trades; (3) administrative exiles and individuals who had their rights suspended by a court; (4) individuals economically dependent on the previously listed; and (5) the mentally ill.” It is not difficult to see how these categories could balloon to the dimensions of an out-out war against society, as discussed above. See Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Of course, Suny could argue that this document falls in line with the principle that “some omelets that are worth broken eggs, but, as anyone making breakfast knows, first one should make sure that all the ingredients are available and remember that eggs must be broken delicately, not smashed so that yokes, whites, and shells all get cooked together” (“Obituary,” p. 318).
137. Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell,” p. A27.
138. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 295.
139. Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett “The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 1 (2000): p. 52.
140. In my view, the best analysis of the intellectual origins and transmogrifications of Communism and Fascism remains Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution: Ideological Polarizations in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction, 1991), with a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz (originally published by the University of California Press in 1981).
141. Evans, The Coming, p. 324.
142. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 220 and 240.
143. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 65.
144. The Black Book, p. 755.
145. See Weber, “Revolution?” p. 43.
2. DIABOLICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE (IL)LOGIC OF STALINISM
1. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 211-63.
2. One could argue, however, that the activities of the People’s Court in Nazi Germany in the context of the obvious defeat in the war came very close to Soviet show trials. This institution functioned similarly to Stalin’s courts during the Great Terror when trying the group led by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, which tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 in a failed attempt commonly known as Operation Valkyrie. See Hans Mommsen, Germans against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance under the Third Reich (London: Tauris, 2009).
3. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 400.
4. For one of the most thoughtful and still valid interpretations of the dynamics of the Soviet bloc, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).