Now that the 20th century is at last "history", what does this enhanced perspective tell us about the relationship between that century's two great threats to liberal democracy, Nazism and Communism? During the high Cold War decade following 1945, the matter appeared simple to the majority of Western opinion: the two systems should be equated in their infamy. Yet, as anti-Communism came under fire in the 1960s, and as the Cold War itself dwindled into detente in the 1970s, the Hitler-Stalin comparison largely fell into disrepute. At the end of the 1980s, however, European Communism's ignominious end re-opened the question, thus inaugurating a decade of debate over the issue of which "totalitarianism" was the greater scourge. Nor will this issue ever really go away again. For while Nazism and Communism are most unlikely to recur in the historical forms in which we knew them, the political impulses underlying them are still at work in modern political culture, indeed in the human condition itself.

Thus far, however, the renewed debate has suffered from an exceptional imbalance between heat and light. And this is because when we ask whether it is Communism or Nazism that must be judged the greater evil, we are too often unclear about what exactly should be compared in order to frame an answer. The usual procedure is to contrast inventories of horror: numbers of victims, means and circumstances of their deaths, types of concentration camps. Yet how do we make the transition from the raw facts of atrocity to a judgment of their moral meaning? Why, for example, is the industrialized extermination mounted by Hitler more evil than the "pharaonic technology" employed by Stalin and Mao Zedong? It would be an error to suppose a simple or direct answer to such a question. Rather, this greatest of vexed issues handed down from the 20th century must be approached on three interrelated levels: moral, political and historical.

On the moral level we are concerned with the philosophical matter of ascertaining degrees of evil; it is this exercise that arouses the greatest passion and that has produced the most extensive literature. On the political level, we are inquiring whether the two systems may be legitimately equated as totalitarian polities; and since totalitarianism is clearly a bad thing, this subject also has moral ramifications that make it almost as contentious as the first. Yet to give convincing answers to either of these questions, the indispensable preliminary is to confront some basic historical problems: Nazism and Communism's two-decade relationship with each other, their organizational structures, their ideological purposes, and their actual res gestae.

It is to delineating a perspective on this third, historical level that the present essay is devoted. The first level will be touched on only by implication; the second level, which is more easily grounded in history, is given greater direct attention and evaluation, and something like a concept of generic totalitarianism will emerge by the end. As for the third level, the task here is not to make a substantive, still less a systematic, historical comparison, but rather to trace the historiographic parameters of such an investigation. The reason for this, as we shall see, is that scholarly writing on Nazism and Communism has developed so unevenly that most combined analyses of the pair to date can hardly qualify as serious. To compare and contrast them from a moral or a political perspective presupposes an equal level of understanding of both as historical phenomena. Since this is alas lacking, dissecting their two somber historiographies is the necessary preliminary to any other judgment.

Sorting Out the Basics

Even within this narrowed-down task we encounter a complex mixture of overlapping and asymmetry. As to the former, there is, first and obviously, a temporal overlapping: Hitler and Stalin were contemporaries; Nazism developed in part in opposition to Communism while Communism's primary defining adversary was always claimed to be "fascism"; and in this interlocking relationship the two went to Armageddon together in the most traumatic moment of the century. Conversely, there is a major temporal asymmetry: Nazism lasted only twelve years and centered in a single country, spreading outward only by conquest, whereas Soviet Communism lasted 74 years and eventually cloned itself over a third of the planet. Indeed, Communism is still with us, though in anemic form, in East Asia and just offshore from Miami.

Then, too, there are asymmetries of a conceptual sort. Is Nazism a unique case or part of a generic "fascism", beginning with Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922 and embracing the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, the Romanian Iron Guard, and Tojo's generals in Japan? After all, Hitler and Mussolini intervened together to aid Franco, they formed a Rome-Berlin Axis and eventually, with Japan, an Anti-Comintern Pact. Until well after the war, the term "Axis" was colloquial shorthand for everyone on the "fascist" side (only Finland escaped obloquy for its involvement).

With the passage of time, however, this picture was significantly blurred. Throughout the century the Communists alone adhered consistently to the category of generic fascism (which they had indeed invented in the 1920s). From the mid-1930s onward the slogan "anti-fascism" beckoned liberals to their side in one or another "popular front", and even today it remains a mobilizing watchword. Non-communist historians, for their part, wavered on this issue; most have distinguished "national authoritarian" regimes, such as Franco's Spain or Salazar's Portugal, with their commitment to social conservatism, a purely defensive foreign policy and traditional religion, from the "neo-pagan" and imperialistic "mobilization regimes" of Germany and Italy. The exceptional nature of the Nazi death camps and the growing postwar awareness of the Holocaust, in conjunction with the thesis of its world-historical uniqueness, have also increasingly argued for Nazism's singularity among European "fascisms."

By contrast, the existence of a generic Communism can scarcely be questioned. It has existed everywhere a Leninist party with the mission of "building socialism" has taken power, that socialism requiring the suppression of private property and the market in favor of institutional dictatorship and a command economy. Even so, this formula has in practice yielded significantly different results from one case and period to another. Thus, within the Soviet matrix there were marked fluctuations in coercive power: from Lenin's War Communism of 1918-21 to the semi-market New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921-29; from Stalin's "revolution from above" of the early 1930s to his Great Terror of the decade's end; and so on to the perilous wartime and imperial postwar periods. (Nazism, on the other hand, subdivides chiefly into prewar and wartime periods, and public attention has focused overwhelmingly on the latter.) Finally, in the Soviet case, the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras are distinguished from Stalinism by diminished revolutionary vigor and a much-reduced level of terror.

Outside the Russian matrix, variations in the Leninist formula are even more notable. The Soviets' postwar "outer empire" in Eastern Europe was significantly different from the "inner empire" of the USSR itself. There were no real revolutions in Eastern Europe (outside of Yugoslavia, which soon left the Soviet orbit, and the strange case of Albania), but instead a diversified process of conquest and absorption. Postwar Poland, for example, where the peasantry was never collectivized, is hardly comparable to Russia under Stalin, or even to Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. And although political police were active everywhere in Eastern Europe, there was simply not space enough for real Gulags.

When we move from the Soviet zone in Europe to the Communisms of East Asia, we find greater differences still. Not only were all these regimes institutionally independent of Moscow, but each was different from the other. Kim Il-sung's socialism in North Korea meant a hermetically closed family dictatorship as surreal as that of Ceausescu; yet the "Great Leader" retained the Soviet alliance as a shield against China. Mao Zedong, on the other hand, was Moscow's greatest enemy on the Left; so to prove his superiority over Khrushchev and his "capitalist roaders", he outdid even Stalin's terror in seeking instant socialism through the Great Leap Forward of 1959-61 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Ho Chi Minh, by contrast, though as authentically Leninist as his predecessors to the north, at least channeled his party's energy into a war his population supported. Pol Pot, finally, produced the demented reductio ad absurdum of the whole Communist enterprise as he attempted to out-radical not just Moscow, but Beijing and Hanoi as well. All these Communisms, moreover, varied in the intensity of their fury from one period to another, most notably as Maoism gave way to Deng Xiaoping's "market Leninism."

Another important variation on the generic Communist formula is introduced by the overlap of Leninism with nationalism, not only in the Soviet zone and in East Asia but also in Cuba. It has often been noted that "proletarian internationalism" has been a very weak competitor to modern nationalism; and indeed, ever since European socialist parties in 1914 voted for war credits in their respective parliaments, in almost any crisis workers have put patriotism first. Consequently, it has been claimed that Stalinism was basically a new species of messianic Russian nationalism, that Maoism was an exacerbated Chinese reply to Soviet "hegemonic" pretensions, that Ho Chi Minh was a kind of a Vietnamese George Washington, and that the sui-genocidal rampage of Pol Pot was a product of traditional Cambodian hatred of Vietnam directed now toward surpassing the Communist exploits of Ho Chi Minh. Obviously, also, Fidel Castro's revolution was a reaction to Yankee imperialism. Nationalism, of course, has played a role in all these cases; the real question, however, is whether that role has been sufficient to demote generic Communism to secondary rank.

The answer depends on what we consider to be Communism's social base. If we take the rhetoric of the "international workers' movement" literally, then worker addiction to nationalism argues against generic Communism's importance. In truth, however, that "movement" has always been a movement of parties, not of proletariats. These parties, moreover, were founded and largely run by intellectuals, at least in their heroic phase, not by their alleged worker base; only later were any Communist parties run by such ex-worker-apparatchiks as Khrushchev or Brezhnev. By then, of course, the full administrative autonomy of the East Asian parties (and the relative autonomy of the East European ones) had fragmented Stalin's genuinely international movement into sovereign entities. Even so, each entity preserved its Leninist structure and goals.

Resolution of the question of nationalism prevailing over Communism also depends on historical period: in the case of Lenin's and, indeed, Stalin's Russia, the answer is definitely no; in the case of Jiang Zemin's China it may turn out to be yes. We will not know for sure until we see how the last Leninist regimes disappear. An even deeper answer to this question, however, is that Leninist parties, whether united or at odds with each other, have mastered their populations' nationalism only so long as their millenarian zeal lasted; when that zeal waned, nationalism returned to the fore. Indeed, the withering away of zeal is what explains the fate of both the former Soviet Union and the Yugoslav federation. In each case it was the prior death of the party that produced the collapse of the unitary state, with such former apparatchiks as Slobodan Milosevic and Nursultan Nazarbaev taking up the nationalist cause to retain power.

Compare and Contrast

Given this range of asymmetries between Nazism and Communism, as well as the differences among the Leninist cases, what should we compare in assessing their political kinship or the depth of their criminality? Psychologically satisfying though it may be for some to find sharp distinctions between the two systems and for others to find close kinship, it should be obvious that the vagaries of history force us to settle for a mixture of similarities and differences.

The basic similarity is that both movements, whatever they claimed to be themselves, had the same enemy: liberal democracy. Both emerged in the wake of World War I as explicit negations of Europe's long-term movement toward constitutional government founded on universal suffrage; and so both replaced rule-of-law parliamentarianism with a one-party regime under a supreme leader, exercising dictatorial power and employing police terror. Both regimes, furthermore, instituted command economies, whether through outright nationalization as in Russia or by administrative pressure as in Germany. Finally, both were driven by millenarian ideologies: in the case of the Nazis, the quest for the world hegemony of their Aryan Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), and in the case of the Communists, the triumph of world socialist revolution.

These political and ideological characteristics, of course, amount to what is known as the "totalitarian model", as this was defined in the wake of World War II by such figures as Hannah Arendt and the political scientists Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In truth, however, this perception of similarity antedates the war. In the 1930s it was commonplace to refer to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin collectively as "the dictatorships." Indeed, this perception had been given scholarly conceptualization as early as 1937 by Elie Halévy in his brilliant book, The Era of Tyrannies, which explained the emergence of the dictatorships by a conjunction of the socialist ideal with the mass mobilization of modern war.

When modern war actually came a second time it confirmed the 1930s' prior judgment, first of all in the collusion between the two chief dictators in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939. Even more important, however, was the revelation of the Nazi death camps, which made it starkly clear that modern "dictatorship" was an unprecedented phenomenon in world politics. At the same time, Communism's victory did nothing to mitigate its own, equally unprecedented state terrorist power. In the face of these realities, the classical terms "tyranny" and "despotism" were inadequate, as was the limp modern label "authoritarianism"; so "totalitarianism" carried the definitional day. This choice was confirmed as militant Communism spread during the next five years over a third of the planet to reach its historical apogee. Thus, as World War II gave way almost immediately to the Cold War, Stalin came to fill the whole totalitarian space, becoming in the eyes of the liberal world Hitler's moral heir.

This unitary perception of totalitarianism, however, progressively lost ground after Stalin's death in 1953. As Khrushchev attempted limited reform and as open dissidence appeared under Brezhnev, the Soviet party-state, though it remained tyrannical, appeared distinctly less total and monolithic. Concurrently, as scholarship accumulated about the Third Reich, the Nazi dictatorship came to seem less Behemoth-like--to acknowledge Franz Neumann's early contribution to our understanding of Nazism--and more "polycratic" than had earlier been supposed. Finally, as public awareness of the Holocaust grew after the 1960s, the Nazi case came to be increasingly distinguished from the Soviet one until it was widely regarded as a historically unique manifestation of "absolute evil." In this perspective, Mussolini's regime, with a weak party-state, no camp system, and only belated anti-Semitism, came to be treated as distinctly less evil than Hitler's. In consequence, the concept of generic fascism retreated into the background.

Concurrently, throughout the postwar period the evil of Nazism was increasingly dramatized to the world: the Nuremberg trials of 1945-46, the Eichmann trial of 1961-62, Claude Lanzman's film Shoah of 1986, and so on to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List in 1993. But beyond the writings of Soviet dissidents such as Evgeniia Ginzburg and especially Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, there have been no comparable popular dramatizations of the Gulag to world opinion. Nor has any major Communist figure ever stood trial. East Germany's Erich Honecker was permitted to leave for Chile, and sensitive souls, later so zealous in extraditing General Augusto Pinochet to the same destination, were not at all disturbed. The second-rank figures now being considered for trial in Cambodia (who even knows their names?) will surely not be brought to justice in any foreseeable future.

Thus, by the time of European Communism's collapse in 1989-91, most specialists of both Nazism and Sovietism had renounced not only generic fascism but the totalitarian model as well, emphasizing instead the absolute singularity of Hitler's Reich. This may well be the historically justified evaluation, but, for present purposes, the relevant point is that the disproportion between the attention accorded Nazi and Communist crimes has been so great as to constitute, a priori, a double standard in judging them. Indeed, the disproportion has made the exercise of comparison as such a sign of political bad taste.

This double standard, however, was challenged by the Communist collapse--and it has not been sufficiently emphasized that this collapse was not just Soviet, but eminently generic. It began with Deng Xiaoping's conversion to the market in 1979 and the 16-month "self-limiting revolution" of Solidarity in Poland the following year; it became irreversible in 1989 with the simultaneous destruction of the Maoist mystique on Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Soviet "outer empire" in Europe; and it culminated in 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet matrix itself. Not only were the geopolitical results of World War II undone, but the "short 20th century", as inaugurated by World War I and Lenin's October, was brought to a close.

The impact of this revolution on our understanding of the old century was not that it revealed the full extent of Communist crime: this had long been no mystery to researchers who really wanted to know. The impact came, rather, from the liberating effect that the system's universal failure had on Western minds: It at last became possible to discuss Communism's record realistically and yet remain in good taste. Hence, the 1930s' inclination to compare it with Communism's fascist adversary inevitably returned. The publication of The Black Book of Communism in 1997 was the boldest and most systematic expression of this change. A work of solid scholarship, its greatest originality was to treat the subject of Communist crime not just in terms of the Soviet case, but of Communism worldwide. In this perspective, of course, Communism turned out to be far bloodier than Nazism, totaling roughly 85-100 million as opposed to 20-30 million victims, depending on who is counting and what manner of death is being considered.

Moreover, this unavoidable--and to most people startling--fact raises the question of whether such a quantitative difference translates into a qualitative difference in the degrees of evil embodied by the two systems. At the same time, the geographical extension of the problem affected existing arguments for distinguishing, or conflating, the two systems, in particular as regards the viability of the concept "generic Communism." Is urban, European Communism comparable to rural, Asian Communism? Must generic Communism therefore be broken down, once again, into more basic national and cultural units? Or does the already-noted fact that Communist leaders everywhere were neither workers nor peasants but intellectuals outweigh this sociological consideration? There indeed exists a human bridge between the Red East and its Western godfather: Zhou En-lai embraced Communism in France in 1921, and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot were members of the French Communist Party in Stalin's time.

As of the 20th century's calendar end, however, the verdict of 1989-91 had not really been absorbed into our historical consciousness. The Black Book in particular has provoked a mixed reaction. Although almost a million copies have been sold worldwide, including in both Russian and Chinese (Hong Kong) translations, thus indicating widespread interest, the intelligentsia's reception has been distinctly chilly, beginning in France itself but especially in the United States. For reasons addressed below, this split reaction is indeed part of the problem of comparison itself.

The Historiographic Predicate

In this confused situation, then, the first step toward clarification must be to compare not actual historical cases, but historiographies. As Benedetto Croce long ago remarked, "all history is contemporary history"; and though it is going too far to embrace the post-modern inflation of this point, which would make the past a mere discursive construct or "text", it is true that we invariably read that past through the prism of the present with all of its political, cultural and ethical passions. This circumstance has bequeathed us radically asymmetrical historiographies for Nazism (and/or "fascism") and the different varieties of Communism.

The basic factor in explaining this asymmetry is that the Nazis lost World War II while the Soviets won it. Beginning in 1945, therefore, Nazism's disastrous balance sheet was clear to everyone, and historians had its archives to hand. By contrast, the Soviet "experiment" appeared open-ended until 1991; its records remained secret, and for another half century the liberal world was confronted with the global challenge of its power. Moreover, Nazism's historiography was developed primarily by Germans who had to live with the consequences of the disaster, and hence could not avoid treating it for what it was. The historiography of the various Communisms, on the other hand, offers the bizarre case of a scholarly corpus developed almost entirely by foreigners (we may ignore the official, heroic histories of the various Communist regimes). These outsiders, moreover, were deeply divided over the meaning of Communist revolution as it moved from Stalin to Mao to Castro.

Some of them, who for simplicity's sake we may call cold warriors, sought to mobilize Western opinion against Communism's progression, while others, ranging from cautious doves to outright fellow travelers, sought to justify détente with the adversary, active sympathy for its "achievements", and even "convergence" with its institutions. Our historiography of Communism, therefore, has always been as much a debate between the domestic Left and Right about Western hopes and fears as it was an inquiry into Soviet and Maoist realities. So, for almost a century intelligentsia "political pilgrims" trudged from Lenin and Trotsky to Mao and Ho and on to Castro and Ché. Nazism, on the other hand, has found foreign admirers since 1945 only among such fringe figures as the British historian and Nazi apologist David Irving.

The result of these contrasting circumstances is that we have radically different "databases" for our two cases: the historiography of Nazism is voluminous, rich and varied, whereas the historiography of Communism, though copious (at least for the Soviet case) is fragmentary, thin and defective. In fact, much of it is out-and-out misleading.

This historiography's weakest link is East Asia. Despite the brief popularity of the "Little Red Book", the Maoist mystique in the West never rivaled that of Lenin and Stalin, and the premier American school of Sinology, that of John K. Fairbank, was, to say the least, lacking in lucidity about the Chinese regime while the Great Helmsman was still in charge. It is no exaggeration to claim that the Western-language historiography of 20th century East Asia (except for defeated Japan) has developed seriously only in the last two decades; and even then the archives of all the East Asian Communist regimes remained closed. Nor was the historical investigation of modern East Asia driven by the quest to measure evil that the Holocaust has provided to the Nazism-Stalinism comparison: Hitler and Auschwitz, or even Stalin and the Gulag, have never been a focus of moral debate in East Asia. These issues, then, are not a universal preoccupation, but only a European or Western one.

So we are returned to our point of departure in the Nazi-Communist confrontation in Europe during the period 1930-45 and its treatment in German and Western Soviet historiography. In both bodies of literature, the first mode of explanation was Marxist, or at least marxisant. In the Russian case, this was for the obvious reason that the Revolution was supposedly "proletarian", and Westerners wanted to find out if this were really true. So émigré Mensheviks, until 1939 in Berlin and Paris and after the war in New York, were prominent in spreading this perspective, powerfully aided by the Revolution's great loser (who nonetheless remained its prophet), Trotsky, and such of his disciples as Isaac Deutscher. In the German case, émigré Social Democrats or other Leftists, such as Franz Neumann or Arthur Rosenberg, played a similar role in molding Western perceptions, with the result that Nazism, when it was not explained in the Communist manner as the product of "finance capital", was given a social base in "lower middle classes threatened by proletarianization."

After the war, however, the two historiographies diverged, with that of Nazism emerging as by far the more complex and variegated. If this scholarly corpus has a leitmotiv, it may be called Vergangenheits-bewältigung; that is, mastering or overcoming the past. In broad outline, this enterprise developed as follows.

After an initial postwar phase of conservative resistance to facing up squarely to that past, in the 1970s a new generation produced a "Hitler Welle", or Hitler wave, an increasingly probing body of literature, as researchers moved from classical prewar Marxism to the para-Marxist Frankfurt School, to Max Weber, to the French Annales School or American structural-functionalism. The first fruit of this methodological mix was a sophisticated elaboration of the totalitarian thesis's emphasis on politics and ideology. This effort in turn, and in conjunction with extensive explorations in social history, fueled a debate over Nazism as the product of a long-term German Sonderweg, or special path of development. In due course, the first of these interpretations was challenged for exaggerating the Nazi regime's internal coherence and the second for oversimplifying German historical development.

All these debates, moreover, were stimulated by the Holocaust's growing centrality in the German national consciousness, a problem clearly resistant to ordinary political or social interpretation. This issue, therefore, engendered still another debate, this time between intentionalists, who emphasized Hitler's racist ideology, and functionalists, who emphasized the regime's institutional dynamics and the unfolding of the war--that is, politics. As was only to be expected, in the late 1980s these developments produced a conservative reaction explaining Nazism as a response to Bolshevism, though in the ensuing Historikerstreit (historians' quarrel) these dissenters clearly lost out. Down to the present, therefore, political, ideological and indeed millenarian explanations have been further refined, and the thesis of Nazi singularity has essentially prevailed. The conclusions of this historiography, moreover, are known in general outline to social scientists in other fields. Who among them has not heard of the German Sonderweg, the intentionalist-functionalist debate or the Historikerstreit? And if anyone needs a refresher course on these matters there exist whole books that sum them up.

By contrast, Soviet Communism has never been integrated into the common historical culture of Western academia. For example, a prominent historian of Nazism, in commenting on a recent book venturing some comparisons of Hitler and Stalin, objected that the author "tends to rely more on older scholarship more closely associated with the politicized arguments of the Cold War than on the heavily documented studies by younger scholars of the Soviet Union who have worked extensively in recently opened former Soviet archives." In other words, this Germanist believes that scholarship on Soviet Russia in recent decades has been non-political, "value-free" and archivally based to the same degree as the scholarship on Nazism. This is decidedly not the case. When comparing Nazism with Communism, Westerners are in fact hobbled by a great disparity in our knowledge of the two cases.

Thus, although most Soviet specialists are literate in what academia's common historical culture tells us about Nazism, specialists of Nazism have no comparable literacy about the development of Soviet studies. Who among them knows that calling October 1917 a "coup d'état" was long a fighting matter within the profession? Who understands what was at stake in the debate over the "Bukharin alternative" versus the "Cultural Revolution" of 1928-31? Or how many non-specialists are aware that Sovietology's still dominant explanations of Stalinism were laid down in the 1970s, two decades before Moscow's archives were opened? In consequence, the comparison of Nazism and Communism has been largely the affair of people who know a great deal about the former but precious little about the latter--if they are not downright misinformed about it.

The Soviet Deficit

Consequently, Soviet historiography must be outlined here more fully than was done for Nazism--all the more so since there exists no handy short course of Sovietology to which an outsider might turn. A still more crucial difference is conceptual: if the Sovietological corpus has a leitmotiv, it is not overcoming a painful past; it is mining it to divine a future in which the "experiment" would at last turn out right.

Accordingly, postwar Soviet historiography overall developed in the reverse direction from that of Nazism: that is, it moved from the primacy of politics and ideology acting "from above" to the primacy of socioeconomic processes, particularly popular radicalism, acting "from below." Or, in the field's shorthand, it moved from the "totalitarian model" to social-history "revisionism." This shift occurred in part for the professional reason that, beginning in the 1960s, social history predominated in all branches of the discipline. And who can deny the necessity of knowing the social facts in any historical configuration? In the Soviet case, though, this trend was pushed to an extreme by politics. For the Soviet Union was then mellowing while the Western cause was turning sour in Vietnam; so the totalitarian model was denounced as mere Cold War ideology and a gross caricature of Soviet complexities. In its place, social process was enthroned as the basic explanatory principle of Communism. To be sure, "cold warriors" such as Robert Conquest continued to write about Communist terror, but such concerns came then to be viewed by the mainstream as archaic and superficial.

So revisionism proceeded to discover a Soviet Union that was at the same time social and sociable. As the new narrative ran, the Leninist record, though flawed by Stalin's excesses, was nonetheless an overall achievement and a durable feature of modernity. The Communist system thus must be understood as an alternative form of "modernization", one promising, moreover, a social-democratic fulfillment internally and enduring détente internationally.

The ideological subtext of this picture should be readily apparent. The new narrative, after all, began with the thesis that October 1917 was not a Bolshevik coup d'état, as the "totalitarians" claimed, but a social revolution of workers and peasants; and in 1917 the masses did indeed revolt against the possessing classes. Yet it is equally obvious that they themselves did not come to power; a party of Marxist ideologues did. After such a beginning, it ought not be surprising that revisionism followed October's heirs in real history by developing in two divergent directions. The movement divided into what might be called "soft" and "hard" versions--the cause of the divorce being those troublesome Stalinist excesses.

To the soft revisionists, true Leninism was the semi-market NEP of the 1920s, an allegedly humane path to socialism defended after the Founder's death by Nikolai Bukharin; and in view of this "Bukharin alternative", Stalin's brutal "revolution from above" became an "aberration."  The hard revisionists, on the other hand, rejected the NEP "retreat" to the market and instead claimed that Stalin's first Five-Year Plan was October's real culmination and Lenin's authentic heritage. This "second October", moreover, allegedly developed from below through a "Cultural Revolution" (1928--31) of workers and party activists. The essence of the Stalin era consequently was the proletariat's massive upward "social mobility"--into the Party nomenklatura, that is. As for the Great Terror of 1936--39, the hard revisionists swept it under the rug with the claim that it was only "a monstrous postscript" to the Revolution, while the number of deaths by execution was modestly placed in the "low hundreds of thousands." Another revisionist classic recognized only that "many thousands of innocent victims were arrested, imprisoned and sent to labor camps. Thousands were executed."

Even granted that until the opening of the Soviet archives after 1991 our knowledge of the system was incomplete, at no time were these figures anything less than prima facie absurd. It is inconceivable that anyone could get away with similarly egregious claims in German history. Yet the hard revisionists at most encountered polite collegial chiding--except from the soft revisionists, who were enraged at their whitewashing of Stalin. The reason for this internecine passion, of course, is that, as the two schools squared off in the 1970s and early 1980s, they were really arguing over what to hope for under the next General Secretary: Bukharinite "socialism with a human face", or a refining of Brezhnev's existing "authoritarian welfare state" with its "institutional pluralism." The underlying reason for these ideological contortions was that Stalin was indeed the culmination of the Soviet story and at the same time, in the eyes of his own heirs, a criminal.

It should be transparent to any neutral observer that we are not dealing here with rival emphases in social history but with a sectarian dispute between two species of ideologues: neo-Bukharinists and para-Stalinists. Indeed, Western revisionism overall developed within what was basically a Soviet, or at least a Marxist, perspective. Putting matters this bluntly, however, was until recently impossible in academic discourse, especially in America. Down through the failure of Gorbachev's perestroika, any allusion to these obvious facts was met with protestation from the revisionists that they were not Marxists but merely positivists whose "social science", unlike that of the Cold War "totalitarians", was a strictly non-political, "value-free" enterprise. Or they might revert to the countercharge of "McCarthyism."

But bluntness is presently a therapeutic necessity; for, though the time is long past when the revisionist master narrative was plausible, the time has not arrived when this is adequately reflected in the historiography. Where now are revisionism's "conquests"? October as a "social revolution" rather than a Party coup d'état? The "Bukharin alternative" of market socialism as true Marxism-Leninism? The "Cultural Revolution" of 1928--32 as the democratic crowning of the Soviet edifice? All are no more than fantasy chapters of an epic culminating in a socialism that turned out to be a mirage. All the same, though revisionism itself ended along with the Soviet regime, the revisionists themselves are still in place, and the debris of their narrative still frames our historical discourse and furnishes the basis for our comparisons with Nazism. Since the parties concerned will not say this, it is necessary to say it in their stead. If they protest their positivist purity, this should carry no more weight than David Irving's protestations that he is not anti-Semitic or partial to Nazism.

Why, however, did David Irving fail so utterly, while the revisionists' perspective was so long triumphant? The first reason, of course, is that they wrote before anyone knew how the Communist adventure would turn Out. As Croce's mentor G.W.F. Hegel famously put it, "the owl of Minerva flies only with the falling of the dusk." So it was only after Communism at last ended up in the disaster column, as Nazism had fifty years earlier, that it became possible to have a "normal", post-mortem Soviet historiography.

The transformation has begun: in the 1990s a new generation was actively rethinking the Soviet experience--though as yet no new paradigm has emerged to orient what one commentator has called "a creative disorder." Indeed, given the thirty-year accumulation of revisionist literature, it will take a full generation to dig out "from under the rubble", to borrow Solzhenitsyn's phrase about the Soviet legacy itself. One thing, however, is already clear: a valid new historiography of the Soviet Union can be built only by reversing revisionism's explanatory priorities; that is, by treating the Soviet system in the first instance not as a society, but as a regime.

The reason why Minerva's owl was so slow to fly in the Russian case (contrary to its performance after the French events that inspired Hegel's maxim) is that October 1917, unlike 1789, never knew a Thermidor. To be sure, ideological zeal abated after Stalin's death in 1953, but the structures of Party, Plan, and Police that he and Lenin had between them built remained in place until 1991. The heritage of 1917 therefore ossified into the historically unprecedented phenomenon of an "institutional revolution" (to borrow a label from later Mexican history); and its only Thermidor was its demise. Not until the historiographical consequences have been drawn from such a paradoxical outcome can we hope to have symmetrical "databases" for comparing Nazism and Communism.

The Role of Socialist Ideology

YET EVEN IF this empirical goal is achieved, the comparison between Communism and Nazism will always be clouded by their contrasting ideological auras, and these derive from their relationship to that greatest of modern utopias: socialism. Both movements after all claimed that name, and both pretended to speak with a single voice for all the "people." Hence both strove to transcend liberal democracy by submerging the individual in the "collective" or the "communal", whether a fraternal internationalism or a particularistic Volksgemeinscbaft. And this aspiration--presciently diagnosed by Elie Halévy--is surely the lowest common denominator of generic totalitarianism. This concept, therefore, is best considered both as a historical benchmark and as an ideal type, not a literal description of either dictatorship's "monolithic" control of society.

Over and above this bond, however, socialism is relevant to the Nazi-Communist comparison for a still more basic reason: the pervasiveness of its mystique in the moral economy of modern politics. Generic socialism, after all, was the preeminent theoretical project of the 19th century, and its maximal version was the Marxist program of leaping to an egalitarian society through the suppression of private property and the market. This ambition then became the great practical endeavor of the 20th century, whether its adherents settled for the diluted democratic variant of a welfare state or sought complete triumph through a Leninist party-state.

Well, we have just spent a near century finding out that Marxism's perfect egalitarian society does not exist, and that on the far side of capitalism there is only a Soviet-type regime. Thus the Great Collapse of 1989-91 brought not only Communism's fall but that of generic socialism, as well. To be sure, there are still numerous socialist parties and governments in the world, but none proposes to make the world-historical leap out of capitalism. (It is noteworthy, for example, that the anti-globalization surge of 1999--2001 never called itself "socialist.") Still, this second fact has not yet penetrated the contemporary consciousness; and until it does, the specter of socialism will haunt the Hitler-Stalin debate.

For that specter brings with it all the passion of the Left-Right polarity introduced into history by 1789. In the 19th century this polarity focused on the universal-suffrage republic versus monarchy and aristocracy, and in the 20th it graduated to the antithesis socialism versus capitalism antithesis. Yet, though the 19th-century political republic could be achieved, the 20th-century social republic proved to be a far more elusive goal. Most modern societies have therefore been governed in an alternation of Left-center reformism and Right-center prudence, and so rarely faced the stark choice: either capitalism or socialism. In the great crises of 1914--45, however, this centrist equilibrium broke down, and both "fascism" and Communism attempted the impossible millenarian leap. Ever since, in the modern political dynamic Communism has functioned as the absolute Left and Nazism as the absolute Right.

This absolutizing of extremes clearly favors the former--and at the expense of the center. In the 19th century the outer limit of the Right had been the Bourbons, and the first principle of progressive politics was "no enemies to the Left." In the 20th century the outer limit of the Right became Hitler, and the Golden Rule received the ironclad corollary of "no friends to the Right." In consequence, the thesis that Hitler was incomparably evil places moderate conservatives on permanent warning against all "unsavory" allies to their right, and indeed against their own dark demons. Their comparing Stalin to Hitler only "plays into the hands of the Right"; for is not the real target of the comparison the Social Democratic Left?

It is because of this dynamic that The Black Book met with the chilly reception it did--beginning with France's most prestigious newspaper, Le Monde. For did it not deflect attention from the far Right racist, Le Pen? And of course, in the light of 20th-century experience, racism must always be denounced and combated. Yet in strict logic, it hardly follows that this means refraining from honest (if belated) recognition of Soviet crime, any more than the scholarly "historicizing" of Nazism entails its moral "trivialization."

Clearly, such passionate reactions cannot be explained by the economic and institutional differences between "capitalism" and "socialism"; only the moral and philosophical values grounding those differences provide an answer. At this most basic level, what the Left is about is equality and universality, or the fraternal unity of the human species; the Right, on the other hand, is about hierarchy and particularity, or the functional differentiation indispensable to making any society work--and this inevitably means inequality. By extension, moreover, the Right, which in the 19th century defended the Old Regime cause of "altar and throne", in the democratic 20th century came to defend both capitalism and the various national particularities defining competing societies. In American usage, the shorthand contrast for the Left-Right difference is "compassionate" versus mean-spirited." (In France, it is the presence versus the lack of "generosité.") In modern political rhetoric, therefore, it has always been easier to make a vibrant plea for equality and fraternity than for hierarchy, distinction and privilege, or even for individual liberty. So the moral economy of modern politics gives the Left a permanent, built-in advantage.

This fact grounds what is perhaps the most frequently drawn moral distinction between the two regimes: the claim that no matter how criminal Communism became, it was inspired initially by "good intentions" and humanistic universalism (in Le Monde's high style: the contrast is between la face lumineuse of Communism and its face tenebreuse). Nazism, on the other hand, was never motivated by anything but national egotism, racism, and conquest. (Of course, it is these associations that explain the already-noted double standard for judging crimes that are in effect comparable.) Thus such a strong anti-communist as Raymond Aron had at one time advanced what is now a standard argument: Nazism must be judged worse than Communism since it practiced extermination as an end in itself while the latter did so as a means to some other political or economic end.

This popular Western distinction, however, may be contrasted with the opinion of such East Europeans as Vasilii Grossman, Aleksander Wat, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, all of whom had direct experience of both Nazism and Communism and all of whom held the two to be comparably criminal. The crux of their judgment is that Communist mass murder remains mass murder whatever its ideological inspiration; indeed, they suggest that crimes against humanity committed in the name of humanity are in a sense more perverse than the blatant criminality of Nazism. This view arises from the insidious nature of the Soviet "Lie." A colloquial Soviet term for "the system" made famous by Solzhenitsyn, the Lie denotes the fatal contradiction of a universalism driven, not by charity, fellow feeling or natural Reason, but by the ideological principle of "class war", or more exactly pseudo-class war. And of course, the Soviet "building of socialism" was not a genuine social contest but a political struggle in which the redeemer cl ass (that is, its ideological substitute, the party) was destined to eliminate all exploiting classes (namely, anyone resisting party policies). So, as Solzhenitsyn put it, "in the twentieth century ideology made possible evil on a scale of millions."

THESE TWO antithetical moral judgments point to a moral of their own: that our efforts to frame value distinctions between Nazism and Communism will continue to seesaw back and forth with the contrasting magnetisms of the Right-Left polarity. Nor will this cease to be true even as the historiographies of the two movements approach each other in empirical grounding and analytical sophistication.

Nevertheless, achieving that rapprochement remains the precondition for all serious comparison. And for this, the first priority is to overcome the pitiful lag a half-century has put between the historiographies of Stalinism and Nazism. Consider the distance the latter has traveled. No one talks any longer about "finance capital" or "proletarianized lower middle classes" as basic causes of Nazism. Instead, among our most recent authorities, Ian Kershaw highlights Hitler's "charismatic" Führerprinzip and Michael Burleigh the "political religion" of Aryan racial supremacy. Nor is anyone allowed to be value-free; rather, moral judgment is de rigueur and crime is called by its proper name. Rightly so, for moral judgments are indeed intrinsic to all historical understanding.

So how to narrow the discursive gap? A solution might well be for historians of the Soviet phenomenon to read each other less and their Germanist colleagues more. This, in turn, might give the latter a worthy incentive to help close the literacy gap on their eastern flank

Martin Malia earned his Ph.D. at Harvard and spent most of his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley. His principal works are The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 and Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum.