Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (review)

For the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, Bolshevism and fascism represented two incarnations of the disastrous presence of the devil in history: “The devil ... invented ideological states, that is to say, states whose legitimacy is grounded in the fact that their owners are owners of truth. If you oppose such a state or its system, you are an enemy of truth.”¹ Both movements pretended to purify humanity of any agents of decadence and dissolution. For the Communists, the enemy was represented by private property, the bourgeoisie, the priests, the kulaks. The Nazis identified the Jewish “vermin,” “Judeo-Bolshevism,” “Judeo-plutocracy,” and Marxism as the sources of all calamities. Fascism (and its radical version, Nazism) was adamantly anti-communist. In the 1930s, Stalinism made anti-fascism a pillar of its propaganda, seducing intellectuals and galvanizing resistance movements worldwide. Both party-movements execrated and denounced liberalism, democracy, and parliamentarianism as degradations of true politics, which would transcend any divisions through the establishment of perfect communities (classless or racially unified). Fundamentally atheistic, both communism and fascism organized their political objectives in discourses of alleged emancipation, political religions meant to deliver the individual from the impositions of traditional morality and legality.

Psychological and psychopathological explanations for these uniquely murderous regimes are not sufficient: whereas Stalin and Hitler were incontrovertibly driven by paranoid exclusionary and exterminist impulses, it would be hard to consider Lenin a mentally unbalanced individual. As a matter of fact, even as staunch a critic of Bolshevism as the Christian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev saw Lenin as a paradoxical personality, an anti-democratic, neo-Jacobin revolutionary, yet a humane individual, animated by a thirst for equality and even a passion for freedom. In the growing body of literature dealing with the two totalitarian experiences of the 20th century, Robert Gellately’s masterful study stands out as uniquely original, insightful, and provocative. An expert on the relationship between the Gestapo and German society, the author understands and explains the multiple connections (complicities, inclusion mechanisms) that created a regime based on a strange yet undeniable consensus. Going beyond the established comparisons between Hitler and Stalin, the author brings Lenin into the story as the true architect of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the real founder of the Gulag system, an entranced ideologue convinced that his vanguard party (a revolutionary political invention that shattered the praxis of international social democracy) was entrusted by an almost mystically defined History to achieve its goals and make humanity content forever, no matter the human costs. The costs, indeed, were appalling, defying our capacity for representation. Endorsing the book, Richard Pipes insists that unlike so many other historians, Gellately places Lenin “alongside Stalin and Hitler as a founder of modern barbarism.”

Ideological fanaticism mixed with all-consuming resentment explains Lenin’s destructive ambitions. Lenin was not only the founder of political propaganda and the supreme priest of a new ecclesiology of the omniscient, infallible Party but also the demiurge of the concentration camp system and the apostle of universal terror. A true Bolshevik, Martin Latsis, one of the Cheka’s leaders, said in 1918: “We are not waging war on individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, we do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet power. The first questions you ought to put are: to what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education and profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused” (71–72).² In the same vein, Hitler saw the war with the Soviet Union and Western democracies as an ideological crusade meant to totally destroy the ideologically de-humanized enemy.³ Gellately quotes the recollections of one of Hitler’s secretaries: “We will win this war, because we fight for an idea, and not for Jewish capitalism, which drives...