HISTORY AND MEMORY

For the contemporary historian, Henry Rousso’s book on Stalinism and Nazism^[1] recalls the recent avalanche of comparative studies of Stalinism and Nazism, ranging from Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin^[2] and Stalinism and Nazism^[3] by Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, to Ernst Nolte^[4] and the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen debate in Germany, and, of course, to the French Black Book of Communism.^[5] It also reminds me of an aged Baltic German I used to know. Whenever he met a historian, he would embark on a long monologue recalling the eventful story of his life, taking the audience from Estonia in the 1920s to Soviet annexation, Nazi occupation, and a dramatic flight from the dreaded Red Army to what would eventually become the GDR and a new dictatorship. Even for an attentive and historically trained listener, the frequent unqualified references to “Us” and “Them” ended in total confusion: “Them” being the marauding armies of the Russian Revolution, the nationalizing (and expropriating) Estonian state, National Socialism, Stalin’s regime of terror, and the Honecker dictatorship, as well as, to some extent, the patronizing and domineering “Wessies” after German reunification. I suspect that in his own memory too, the associations between the various types and periods of authoritarian rule were intuitive and the distinctions rather blurred.
For the historian of today, the challenge is to come to terms with the short twentieth century, which Eric Hobsbawm has rightly dubbed the “Age of Extremes,” without taking recourse to personal memories and authentic experiences as the main points of reference. In the past century, communist and fascist ideologies, and the various regimes based upon them, have drastically impinged upon the individual lives of most Europeans (and tragically redirected or ended the lives of many of them). Analyzing and comparing fascism and communism, National Socialism, and Stalinism amounts to rethinking twentieth-century European history in all its political, cultural, and socioeconomic complexities. To make matters worse, the renewed comparative debate of the 1980s and 1990s was by no means mainly (or even primarily) an academic endeavor. Arguably, the controversies of the Historikerstreit and the Black Book of Communism historicized political confrontations rather than politicized historians’ debates. Thus, any historian striving for an academically sound and insightful comparison of fascism and communism has to steer clear of, or come to terms, with Stephan Courtois’s crude body counts and the objectionable political use of Ernst Nolte’s arguments on the “original sin” of the twentieth century. Even academically, stumbling blocks abound. Many colleagues subscribe to the well-known adagio that fascism is not a term for historians. Heated debates continue on whether the term “fascism” may be used in a generic sense to include German National Socialism,^[6] whereas the heated debates of the 1980s on the (dis)continuities between Leninism and Stalinism seem to have ended with the fall of the Soviet Union.^[7] Comparative research per se has been complicated by notions of transnational history (Verflechtungsgeschichte), as well as by the transfer of ideas and institutions.^[8]
In the late 1990s, before the smoke from the battle over the Black Book had cleared, the historian Henry Rousso, a renowned specialist on the Vichy regime,^[9] an undigested dark page in French national history, took the initiative to compare fascism and communism from a new angle. Pragmatically, the scope of the comparison is limited to National Socialism and Stalinism as the superlatives of evil regimes of the left and the right. The (English) title and subtitle of his book – Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared – as such already point ambiguously to more than one option for comparison. The titles in fact produce a matrix, comparing Stalinism with Nazism, as well as each system’s history with its memory (understood as politicized debate and the use of the past). Thus, Rousso set out to identify similarities and contrasts between the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, both at a structural-theoretical level based on the workings and characteristics of these regimes (Part 1), and at an political-historiographical level, with case studies on East-Germany, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland (Part 2).
For reasons discussed below, it certainly was no coincidence that it was in Germany and in France that the totalitarianism debate, with its implicit comparison, if not ranking of fascism and communism, reemerged with full (political) force in the 1980s. Rousso argues that the countries of the former Eastern Bloc also provide salient cases, as they have experienced half a century of communist dictatorship preceded by authoritarian regimes and fascist occupation or rule. In Germany for obvious reasons, but also in France and recently in the former communist states that now are (or soon will be) member states of the European Union, the history of fascism and communism is still very much an open wound and has been highly politicized in the transition period. In the Anglo-Saxon world and in many West European countries, historiographical revisionism has been modest and both fascism and communism are perceived as temporary exceptions and largely externally induced deviations in national history – politically sensitive issues, for sure, but marking as an “Episode of Extremes” rather than an “Age of Extremes.”^[10] On the other hand, the subtitle suggests a comparison between history and memory for all totalitarian regimes, i.e. the tension between academic history writing and the political (ab)use of (personal) memories. As a matter of fact, Part 1 takes on the challenge of regime-level comparisons, whereas Part 2 deals with national case studies at the level of the recent politicized revisiting of the fascist and communist dictatorships.
A review essay assessing the position and merits of Rousso’s endeavor has to probe in several directions. First, taking for granted that the debate on fascism, communism, and any comparisons across regime boundaries was bound to be a politicized debate in France, in Germany and in most of Eastern Europe, the relative merits of these national debates for the academic preoccupation with these historical phenomena deserve closer scrutiny. In each case, the public debate brought the national intelligentsia to the fore in a very classical sense, a role that comes more natural to French and to East European intellectuals than to their German colleagues.^[11] Evidently, Rousso intended to present an alternative to the openly partisan and media-focused approach of the Black Book. Part 2 of his book raises the question of the relative quality of the French, the German, and the various East European debates. What is the added value for the academic debate once political de-escalation has set in and public attention wanes? To what extent do the political-ideological overtones continue to obstruct historical thinking? Consequently, Part 2 also begs the pertinent question whether the assessment of the national debates of the 1980s and 1990s actually provides any insights into the phenomena of communism and fascism or whether these debates are rather informative on the political state of affairs behind the contemporary debate. As, to say it up front, the national case studies are by far the weakest part in Rousso’s chain of argument, my attention will mainly focus on the politicization and academic maturity of the national debates as such. Second, the relative merits of Rousso’s approach to the academic debate have to be contrasted to other comparative perspectives, focusing, e.g., on the ideological regime’s charismatic leaders, moral or legal categories or, in the worst case, on the body count of fascist and communist domestic terror and international warfare. Third, Rousso’s study may hypothetically provide us with new insights and tools for the comparison among fascist regimes, among communist regimes, and between fascism and communism as ideological movements in power. Last, but not least, the ultimate objective may lie beyond the compatibility of Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Ceausescu’s Romania, in generic traits of twentieth-century European history.

POLITICIZED DEBATES AND THEIR ACADEMIC MERITS

The English edition of Rousso’s book demonstrates quite involuntarily to what extent Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the coming to terms with the history of communism and fascism, is a rather introspective national exercise, despite the pan-European character of both movements and their undeniable transnational consequences. Whereas Richard Golsan wrote a highly sophisticated introduction to decipher the academic and political debate in France for an Anglo-Saxon audience, Henry Rousso’s original introduction to the French edition is completely focused on the Black Book as the apple of discord in the French debate and hardly ever cross-refers to the Historikerstreit, Hannah Arendt and her theoretical concept of totalitarianism,^[12] or Daniel Goldhagen. The national case studies in Part 2 also seem to be caught in a national fixation and hardly ever take into account any of the key authors in the “Western” debate on comparative totalitarianism, be it Ian Kershaw, Ernst Nolte, Hannah Arendt, Wolfgang Mommsen, Stephan Courtois, or François Furet. Whether this actually points to a flaw in the respective chapters or a peculiarity of the national debates themselves remains to be seen.

Germany: The German academic and public debate on totalitarianism in the past two decades has centered on two publications: Ernst Nolte’s statement that triggered the Historikerstreit of the mid-1980s and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners of 1996 that resulted in a new public escalation of the on-going academic debate.^[13] Typically, in the long tradition of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the intellectual tradition of totalitarianism theory starting with Hannah Arendt, communism essentially only served as a contrast to National Socialism and fascism in general. The communist regime of the German Democratic Republic played hardly any role in the debate. In academic terms, the totalitarianism debate tended to be a German-Anglo-Saxon dialogue. Arguably only the Furet-Nolte correspondence and the Black Book opened a Franco-German connection by the end of the 1990s.^[14] The essence of the German debate is easily understood in Rousso’s conceptual contrast of history and memory. The dogma of the uniqueness of National Socialism and the Holocaust has been a moral stronghold in political and public debate. For history, the logic of Ian Kershaw’s argument that there can be no uniqueness without comparison is undeniable. For memory (or politics), the unwelcome moral and political implications of Ernst Nolte breaking this taboo demonstrated that politics and justice tend to follow a logic different from academia.^[15] Thus, the uniqueness of the Holocaust remained a cornerstone of the public debate and rightly so. Even politicians of the 1968 generation who at the time of the war in Bosnia made a very emotional, but honest public appeal to not let genocide happen again in Europe, hurried to elucidate that their appeal should not be understood as relativizing the Holocaust. In academic research and historical comparative studies, however, “singularity” is an awkward concept. Holistically each historical event is unique, but this does not contradict the productive comparison of specific aspects. Hitler’s National Socialism demonstrably copied part of its ideology, political culture, and policies from Mussolini’s fascism. Stalinism cannot be understood without the threads of continuity from Leninism and even from tsarist autocracy. For any historical phenomenon, comparison based on well-defined aspects is academically sound and justified. The political taboo on the totalitarian holistic comparison (or equation) of National Socialism and Stalinism essentially should not hamper serious historical writing focusing on comparative aspects and archival analysis. In sum, the national debate typically and uniquely reconfirmed a high degree of consensus and recognition of Germany’s historical responsibility unmitigated by a comparison with the evils and crimes of communism and epitomized in the uniqueness of National Socialism and the Holocaust.^[16] The row around the exhibition of the crimes of the Wehrmacht and especially the Goldhagen book, which claimed that anti-Semitism had been almost genetic in the German populace, indicated the limits of the acceptance of national guilt.

France: In contrast to the German debate, the French debate involved both fascism and communism. Against the backdrop of the debate on the Vichy regime and Marshal Pétain (which involved Henry Rousso) as the French equivalent of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the all-out assault against communism in the Black Book is essential for understanding the French debate and Rousso’s Stalinism and Nazism as a reaction to the reaction. Publicly, the question of the fascism and anti-Semitism of the Action Française and the Vichy regime were taboo for decades. Conversely, the political weight of the French Communist Party and the influence of communist ideology in the left-wing intellectual community in France prevented the development of the totalitarianist debate in the direction of an equation of fascism and communism. In contrast to Germany, the debate in France, once it had been forced upon politics and public opinion by the Black Book, was all about the actual holistic and moral comparison of fascism and communism in a generic sense. The communist defense centered on the (good) intentions of the communist regimes, rather than on the dire outcome of their policies of forced modernization. The adoption of the concept of totalitarianism by disappointed former communists added to the heat of the debate. Again, unlike in Germany, the concept of totalitarianism had never been limited to the twentieth century in France. Many intellectuals looked upon the Russian Revolution as a successor to the French Revolution (with the terreur of Robespierre as an integral part) and thus a (holistic) historical phenomenon beyond the moral categories of evil and injustice. Others, not least François Furet in his Le Passé d'une Illusion, argued that the French Revolution had ended with the fall of communism and that there was enough reason to apply the term “totalitarian” to the French Revolution, too.^[17]

Central and Eastern Europe: Many experts have made the blurring of the (moral) dividing line between perpetrators and victims, and between oppressors and oppressed, one of the defining characteristics of both communism and fascism. Thus, the evident post-1989 urge by politicians and the public all over Eastern Europe to salvage the nation from the legacies and guilt of fascism and communism made for the worst possible basis for an intelligent and academic comparison of those two evils. Even in the best of circumstances, summarizing a historical debate with political angles in a historiographical essay is a real challenge in terms of composition and perspectives. Without the necessary reflective distance, most national chapters in Part 2 end up with a puzzling accumulation of fragmented historiographical and historical analysis, political debate, outbursts of media attention and even moral admonitions by the author. These deficits, most evidently the unwillingness or inability to distinguish between the various layers of the narrative, makes most case studies unhelpful for any general question and the Hungarian chapter quite unreadable. Both on the level of history and on the level of recent historiography and politics, each author in one way or another states the uniqueness of his case instead of searching for common factors.
Whereas the public campaigns in the East European countries were generally directed against the successors to the communist parties and their leaders, the chapter on East Germany demonstrates an exceptional focus on archives and individual victims in a sober and almost bureaucratic way. Given the favorable circumstances of reunification, Germany has produced numerous valuable studies on communism as a political and social system that have, however, hardly been taken into account by the media.
Fortunately, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s chapter on Romania demonstrates that the memory approach has potential, too. She states right away that the common post-1989 practice of comparing (or rather equating) communism with fascism does not so much open interesting perspectives but rather covers up many relevant issues under the cover over “totalitarianism.” She argues that, in the Romanian case, the totalitarian equation was and is used to discredit and delegitimize communism, but avoids implicating ethno-nationalism as an undercurrent that constitutes a continuity from fascism to communism and beyond. Going straight for the Achilles’ heel of the memory part of the book, Laignel-Lavastine doubts that there is in the Romanian case (and for the East in general) a historiography that “could be understood without any reference to power or to the role of memory?” (P. 159) Typically, the debates and public controversies are mainly rhetorical and prejudiced, and certainly not based on any open-minded research or new archival evidence. Paradoxically, in Romania, actual political and bureaucratic obstruction on access to historical archives has by no means restrained the debate on the totalitarian comparison. Actual research, she argues, actively rebuilds a myth of a national anti-communist resistance of the nation and its intellectual elite, rather than probing unwelcome questions concerning the social base of the fascist and communist regimes, which are both portrayed in terms of external factors and foreign occupations. In sum, structural characteristics of twentieth-century history reaching from interwar Romania to fascism, to communism, and to the post-communist transition are utterly unwelcome in the discourse of national reassurance. In other words: “if we are already armed with clearly unimpeachable certainties, why exhaust ourselves searching through kilometers of archives?” (P. 166). Criticizing Romanian intellectuals and historiography for turning a blind eye to their nation’s implication in the Holocaust and wartime dictator Ion Antonescu to the status of a hero, she gives up any historiographical aloofness. In sum, Laignel-Lavastine’s interesting insights concerning “corrupting social compromise” and “relations of violence and allegiance” as an alternative to the totalitarian explanation (P. 165) are not the outcome of the Romanian debate. These insights seem informed by the general Western debate on the characteristics of fascist and communist systems, while they rather go against the grain of the Romanian “debate” by highlighting marginalised voices. Somewhat like in the case of the French Black Book, in Romania the declared objective is apparently to let history serve a laudable political cause and do justice to the victims first. What stands out at the end is the dilemma of history and memory. As long as the comparison or equation of National Socialism and Stalinism has the sole objective of relativizing the Holocaust and reconfirming the Romanian nation’s monopoly of victimization, professional historians hardly stand a chance to dig deeper.^[18] In sum, her analysis has more to say on Romania today than on the systemic comparison of fascism and communism and their legacies.
Henry Rousso’s introduction to the French edition was written to justify the concept of the book and to explicate its methodology. The arguments stating the relevance of the national chapters on (the public and political memory of) fascism and communism are, however, strangely defensive and imprecise. Rousso argues that the focus in Part 2 is not on the parallel experiences of fascism and communism, but on the parallel historiographical retrospectives. He rightly claims that the real comparisons have yet to be accomplished: the comparison between the two totalitarian systems and the comparison of the memories. Thus far, according to Rousso, ideological positions of the left and the right have made short shrift of “any concrete history of the memory of Communism, thus transforming perhaps authentic intuitions or generally accepted stories into established truths” (P. 6). His subsequent justification is defensive and fails to link the two parts of the book, and actually almost decouples them: “The fact that this may be of little help in understanding the eventual relationship between the historical experience of Nazism and Stalinism does not alter the fact that this discussion of memory is a cultural and social fact that deserves to be part of the field of investigation of historians…” (P. 9). As the national chapters in Part 2 neither provide any cross-country comparison nor transcend the crude juxtaposition of communism and fascism of the political debate in each country, Rousso’s claim that in central and eastern Europe the comparison is “at once not only more systematic, more ‘natural,’ but also more fundamental in its stakes than it is in France” (P. 9) is hardly convincing. Rousso cautiously advances the hypothesis that the surprising parallels in the historiography on Nazism and Stalinism – both moving from the study of ideology and politics to cultural and social history – might reflect not only a paradigm shift in the historical sciences, but also the (totalitarian) similarities in historical realities. Bypassing the philosophical question as to whether such complex “realities” exist outside historiography, the hypothesis would by inversion imply that the same paradigm shift in the study of, for instance, the French ancien régime would by inversion suggest similarities with twentieth-century dictatorships.
The serious deficits of the chapters in Part 2 are due both to these unsound terms of reference for the national case studies and to the introspective and political-instrumental character of the respective national debates. The resulting weaknesses of the chapters are aggravated by their unevenness in the French edition. The Romanian chapter, the best in Part 2, is 37 pages long with 85 footnotes, whereas the Polish chapter is only half that size with 3 footnotes. The obvious neglect of the national case studies is also reflected in the English edition. It may be a matter of taste whether the editor of the English edition should have tried to replace references to publications in French with an edition in English wherever available; referring to articles in Romanian by translating the title into French makes sense in a French edition, but much less so in an English edition. To make matters worse, bracketed English translations have been added to Hungarian and Bulgarian titles in the footnotes, whereas Bulgarian (and German) titles are translated neither into French nor into English. It may be true that even with the most careful and conscientious translation and editing, it would still be obvious that the texts had been written for a French publisher. Transliterating the names of key historical persons correctly from the original language into English rather than copying the French transliteration is, however, a must. In this book it is: André Zhdanov, Guergui Dimitrov and Feliks Dzierzynski. No English reader will look for the last Bulgarian dictator and his daughter under “J” for Jivkov(a)!^[19] Last, but not least, the French-English translator refers to the “Journal official” as the medium announcing Hitler’s decrees (P. 62).
Thus, there are many indications that the presentation of national debates from Eastern Europe on fascism and communism was for the French editor an afterthought rather than the core argument of his book. The “double inheritance” (or legacy) of fascism and communism in the East European countries makes the national debates potentially very interesting for the comparative approach. As Henry Rousso frankly indicates in his introduction, at least some authors doubted from the very beginning that the juxtaposition of history (Part 1) and memory (Part 2) would produce any relevant results. Having read the five case studies, one has to confirm their doubts. The case studies reveal a general trend in the national historiographies to exculpate the nation from both (foreign) evils by equating communism with fascism and thereby relativizing any national collaboration with the latter as a lesser evil. At least in the media, the dissenting voices raising uneasy questions largely fall on deaf ears and offer historians little leeway for an academic and historicizing approach. Yet, the debates on the Black Book in France as well as the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen controversy in Germany were politicized media events to the extreme, too. Nevertheless, in hindsight these public controversies have been productive and fruitful for the academic debate on fascism and communism, thanks to the sovereignty and standing of professional historians.
Two key factors might explain these differences between East and West, while juxtaposing history and memory and while comparing fascism and communism. First, both in France and in Germany the historical guild has demonstrated its authority based on its autonomy from politics and society. In each case, however, autonomy did not imply aloofness from politicized media events, even though the requirements of history and memory were bound to collide time and again. Especially in Germany, historians have provided both new archival research as input and a consolidated historical perspective to the public debates, producing sophisticated and most of all nuanced positions. Historians in Eastern Europe were in various ways still struggling to establish such autonomy. Not only public debate, but also most academic publications, essentially circle around what is perceived to be a handful of key documents rather than extensive archival research. Second, the Black Book controversy was clearly directed against communism, the Goldhagen debate underlined the absolute evil of fascism, but the Historikerstreit tended to relativize it. In each debate, however, the nation was implicated and confronted with uneasy questions from the past: Vichy France, “Hitler’s willing executioners” and the full acceptance of National Socialism and the Holocaust as integral parts of Germany history. Conversely, at least the public debates in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary are apologetic without real debate and appear to be geared towards collective denial. The logic and requirements of “memory” will even in the best of circumstances be quite different from those of “history,” but the historical guild can neither ignore politicized public debates on the past nor can it assume the mandate of a judge.

Uniqueness and Comparison

Rousso argues polemically that the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism can have three directions: totalitarian-holistic, historical, and political-juridical (Pp. 10-12). Following Kershaw and Lewin, he rejects the holistic approach of totalitarianism on the grounds that it is extremely vulnerable to political abuse and has failed to produce relevant new historical insights. Arguably, the totalitarian approach is not interested in new insights from empirical, archival research, but strives to reconfirm a political worldview on a much more abstract level. Confronting the Black Book and its initiator Stephen Courtois head on, Rousso also takes issue with the political-juridical comparison. Without arguing that an academic dealing with Nazism or Stalinism should stay out of political debates, Rousso objects to politically and ideologically driven academic statements.^[20] Obviously, counting the numbers of victims on both sides is not only a highly arbitrary undertaking, but also ends up inevitable in the middle of a political in-fight. The in-fight is all about (or at least runs the risk of) relativizing the “evil-ness” of one totalitarian dictatorship by highlighting the crimes and the criminal nature of the other. In other words, the categories used are not those of an academic and especially not those of a historian. “Evil,” “uniqueness,” and “justice” are not productive concepts in actual historical research. As Eric Hobsbawm has argued, would Nazism have been less evil if the number of Holocaust victims had been 3, not 6 million? One might add; does it help our understanding of the nature of Nazism or Stalinism at all to know the exact number of people who died or suffered because of these totalitarian regimes? Despite the obviousness of the negative answer to both questions, Rousso’s plea for empirical historical research is surprisingly defensive, obviously a consequence of the polarized French debate. A comparison as a heuristic-analytical instrument should not require any justification on the level of principle and methodology, even though it might be controversial in its scope or implementation. Holistic-totalitarian comparisons typically zoom in on the consequences of totalitarianism. As Rousso argues, the principled rejection of the totalitarian comparison is equally politically and ideologically motivated and holistic, even though its focuses on the roots and workings instead of the consequences of Nazism and Stalinism.
A comparison might focus on the key persons of the respective dictatorships, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Any biography implies a preference for agency over structures in history and biographies of allegedly omnipotent despots generally take this preference to the extreme. Most of the countless biographies of Stalin and Hitler demonstrate this tendency and fall squarely into the totalitarian paradigm. Only the best of these biographies manage to avoid the inherent traps of producing speculative psychological and psychiatric analyses of evil personalities and portraying static individuals remolding state and society on the basis of a pre-conceived master plan. Although a strong focus on the dictator is in sync with totalitarianism, only one author has taken up the challenge of a double-biography of the Soviet vozhd’ and the 10 years younger German Führer, Alan Bullock with his Stalin and Hitler: Parallel Lives. The fascinating dimension of the double-biography is actually their interaction as competitors for dominance in Europe and each dictator’s struggle to read the other’s mind rather than the parallelism of their lives and careers. The psychological insights from the comparison are almost banal and the explicit comparison of their road to power tends to overstate the similarities, e.g., the role of the party in the respective system.^[21] In the introduction, Bullock distanced himself from Ernst Nolte’s polemical position in the Historikerstreit and insists that the totalitarianist agenda of constructing an archetype on the basis of the case studies of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany is not his agenda. Apart from the vow to keep his narrative firmly rooted in historical realities and to bring to the fore both similarities and differences between the two dictators, there are no further reflections on the validity and limits of the comparison in the broader framework of the totalitarianism debate.
Having accepted the need to distance comparative research on “totalitarian” regimes in twentieth-century Europe from political polarization and instrumentalisation and having realized that empirical research is the only viable alternative to holistic totalitarianism and its equally holistic distracters (as well as to moral-juridical judgments), new challenges await the historian. The stated objective of Part 1 in Stalinism and Nazism is to move beyond the deadlocked dichotomy of totalitarianist and revisionist readings of the nature of Nazism and Stalinism. In this context of historical research, “totalitarianism” refers not primarily to the compatibility of Nazism and Stalinism, but rather to the essential characteristics of these regimes and the relation between state and society. Again, the inevitable political bias is not far below the surface of the historical analysis. The confrontation was more evident in the case of the USSR with the Sovietologists of the 1950s and 1960s arguing that Stalinism (or communism in general, assuming a high degree of continuity from Lenin to Stalin) consisted of a hegemonic party and a despotic ruler exercising absolute power over society, imposing their policies with terror and repressing other political and national movements. Using scarce archival evidence rather than official policy statements since the 1970s revisionists, considered “leftists” by default, have argued the case for a structural approach to Stalinism, pointing to the complex interaction between state and society, which suggested a priority for structural constraints over agency and a weak rather than a strong dictatorship, using both violence and transformative policies to come to terms with a restive society. From a totalitarian perspective this revisionist approach came close to an exoneration of the evil agents.^[22] Evidently, there are important parallels between the Sovietologists versus revisionists debate on Stalinism, and the intentionalists versus functionalists controversy on Nazism.
In order to steer clear not only of the political left-right polarization, but also of the academic totalitarian-revisionist controversy, the key authors of the book, prominent experts in their respective field, Philippe Burrin for Nazism and Nicolas Werth for Stalinism, opted for an approach that is theory-driven rather than empirical, and historiographical rather than historical. Following Kershaw and Lewin, they argue that productive comparison in history focuses on specific aspects of, in this case, Nazism and Stalinism. By doing so, the pitfalls of the holistic approach, and the questions of uniqueness, justice, and evil disappear almost involuntarily. The added value of the comparison is not in the respective correspondence to an archetype of totalitarianism, but in the dynamics of historiography. Undeniable and despite all politicization, historical research on Nazism has the advantage of fifty more years of academic studies and debate based on readily available archives. Conversely, the parallel, but almost completely separate historiography on Stalinism, long hampered by the scarcity of primary sources, however had to rely to a much larger extent on the ingenuity of the historians. By comparing notes, some of the questions raised by Nazism studies may stimulate Stalinism research and some trends discerned by Sovietologists may induce experts on National Socialism revisit their sources, and vice versa. In this respect there is almost a philosophical gap between Rousso’s hypothesis that similarities in historiography may correspond to similarities in historical reality and the logic of Werth and Burrin. They rather argue that the decades of separation of the two historiographies ought to produce an avalanche of new ways of organizing and giving meaning to the historical material.
Although it is obvious that both authors have more sympathy for revisionist approaches and are rather skeptical concerning totalitarianism theories, they start with a balance sheet of the pros and cons of both concepts. The holistic approach of totalitarianism with absolute and unique evil precludes any historical dynamics in the development of the respective regime, turning it into a static edifice. It also turns a blind eye on the ideological roots and political precursors of National Socialism and Bolshevism. Finally, a totalitarian state by default implies both a monolithical state and a one-way relationship with society. (Thus, Werth and Burrin deride the concept of “ineffective totalitarianism” as a contradiction in terminis.) Conversely, revisionists are prone to underestimating the dominant role of the agents – the regime, the party, and most of all the dictator. The structural approach highlights the internal development of the regime, the complex interaction with the populace and the fractures within the regime. While applauding these revisionist contributions of the 1970s and 1980s – partly based on arduous archival research, partly almost intuitive – Werth and Burrin are convinced that the conclusion of “weak dictatorship” in opposition to totalitarianism had been a bridge too far. They consider the revisionism in both Nazism and Stalinism studies part of the general historiographical trend away from political history and toward social and cultural studies (as much as totalitarianism theory is part of the positivism of the 1950s). Indeed, several recent empirical studies tend to re-highlight the role of the political nomenclature and the dictator himself – without, of course, returning to the explanatory monism of totalitarianism theory.^[23] In order to look beyond the deadlock of totalitarianism and revisionism, Werth and Burrin each (in three chapters) review recent history writing on Stalinism and Nazism respectively. Their matrix again derives from Kershaw and Lewin. The first of the three issues concerns the relation between the dictator and the system, i.e. the agent and the structures or the mechanisms of domination. The second issue is the function and forms of violence in each system. The third issue focuses on the antithesis of total control – forms of social deviance and autonomy under fascist and socialist dictatorships. For sure, the six back-to-back chapters on these three issues written by the two renowned experts are the best part of the book. In stark contrast to Part 2, the two authors of Part 1 ask the same questions and have a common perspective (without mechanically check-listing criteria). Consequently, there is consistency in the three chapters on each regime and congruence across the systemic divide. Occasionally, the degree of harmony and parallelism is almost too much, but the pas-de-deux of Burrin and Werth is overall more than salutary compared to the “impressionistic,” to say the least, Part 2. Without being explicitly contrastive, the back-to-back chapters bring out nicely the key differences between Nazism and Stalinism underneath some interesting similarities on a more abstract level.
For Werth and Burrin totalitarianism is a twentieth-century phenomenon – regimes with an unprecedented will (and to a lesser degree, capabilities) to control society and deploy violence. In their argument, “totalitarianism” primarily refers to the potential productivity of an open-minded comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, identifying both similarities and differences. Analyzing Stalinism through the prism of the three questions above, Werth distances himself from the “weak dictator” view and rather points to a crucial break in Stalin’s regime marked by the Great Purges. From there on, he argues, the inherent tension between the consolidation of state-bureaucracy institutions and a clan-type dictatorship geared towards revolutionary change was won by the latter. This “choice” marked a logical consequence of the permanent state of emergency so characteristic of Stalinism and the use of shock troops and violence bypassing normal administrative procedures. Some of Werth’s historical and historiographical findings have their parallels in Burrin’s chapters on Nazism. Burrin highlights the rivalries within the Nazi regime as a polyarchy with again a qualitative change in the regime mode shortly before World War II. In Germany, too, those (i.e. the conservative allies of Hitler) favoring a consolidation of bureaucratic organization of the state and governmental collegiality lost out to Hitler’s ever-smaller inner-circle, the personalization of power with a corresponding increase in juridical informality.
In sum, the parallel histories bring out more differences than similarities: Stalinism’s drive for total and urgent social engineering has no equivalent in Nazism. Hitler was essential to National Socialism, whereas Stalin eventually stood on the shoulders of the party. Whereas expansion was at the core of Nazism (and its demise), Stalin’s “socialism in one country” directed its violence not against outsiders (in whatever definition), but against the Soviet population and the communist cadres. Thus, whereas Stalinism strove to replicate its system in conquered territories, National Socialism experimented with new policies and instruments that were implemented in Germany itself only later. Although the monolithical nature of the Nazi regime has sometimes been overstated, the NSDAP never had to fight the CPSU’s struggle to integrate and to control an obstinate society. Without the monumental weight of the label “totalitarianism,” the comparisons become much more open-minded and nuanced. For some aspects even broader synchronic and diachronic comparisons may follow from the bilateral evaluation of Nazism and Stalinism.

HISTORY BEYOND MEMORY?

There is an evident paradox in Rousso’s concept. The honest intention of the book is to de-politicize and de-emotionalize the debate on the comparison of fascism and communism. For this reason, he chides Stephan Courtois, who inserted the comparison with Nazism into his introduction to the Black Book only to get media coverage for his anti-communist crusade. At the same time, the language of his own introduction is occasionally anything but academic. The Black Book is referred to as a “flawed, but important book … that strives to be scholarly” (Pp. 3, 4) and Courtois’s introduction is called “a muddleheaded attempt” (P. 4). Nevertheless, in his postscript Pierre Hassner applauds Rousso’s “calm and judicious” introduction (P. 281). The merit of the book is indeed its constructive contribution to the de-politicization and de-polarization of the debate, moving it forward toward new questions and balanced perspectives. The praise for this achievement, which is hard to overestimate, goes first of all to the two authors of Part 1, Nicolas Werth and Philippe Burrin.
As noted, the book contains a matrix of comparisons: between Nazism and Stalinism as historical regimes, on the one hand, and between the memory and history of each regime, on the other hand. Evidently, the inter-regime comparison has been far more productive. In hindsight, “memory” in Rousso’s concept and especially in Part 2 hardly refers to individual memories rooted in personal experiences with totalitarian regimes. Today, more than 60 years after Hitler’s death, 50 years after Stalin’s, and one and a half decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, such personal memories are fading: a last generation of eyewitnesses is called upon to contribute authentic impressions to both the political, juridical and historical debates. Inevitably, memory in the strict sense and corresponding issues of justice will retreat to the background. Academic historians have always had and always will have uneasy relations both with eyewitnesses of history and with the use and abuse of history in current politics. The historian is neither the avenger of the victims nor the judge of the perpetrators. In political debates, historians cannot claim privileged access to “the historical truth,” but may be well-placed to at least ask the right questions. Thus, Rousso is only too right when he argues that avoiding historical topics because of their potentially unwelcome political implications is a classic trap of contemporary history (P. 16) and in this respect Nazism and Stalinism will remain “contemporary” for a long time to come.