Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

5

Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism

What is fascism? It is socialism emancipated from democracy.

Charles Maurras¹

The effect of the Communists’ activities at home and abroad was not to unleash a global revolution, but, paradoxically, to give rise to movements that assimilated their spirit and copied their methods to fight Communism. For this reason, the so-called right-radical or “Fascist” movements that emerged in Europe in the wake of World War I are sometimes seen as antithetical to Communism. But as is often the case when ideologies, whether religious or secular, fight each other so fiercely, they do so not because they have contrary principles or aspirations but because they compete for the same constituencies.

The relationship between Communism and “Fascism” has long been a subject of controversy. The interpretation mandatory for Communist historians and favored by Western socialists and liberals holds that the two are irreconcilable phenomena. Conservative theorists, for their part, subsume both under the concept “totalitarianism.” The issue is extremely sensitive because it raises the question whether “Fascism,” and particularly Nazism, its most virulent expression, is related to Marxism-Leninism, and hence, ultimately, to socialism, or else derives from “capitalism.”

The discussion which follows will not address itself directly to this controversy: on this subject there already exists a rich literature.² Instead, it will seek to throw light on the influence which Communism has exerted on Western politics both as a model to emulate and a threat to exploit. Examination of the origins of right-radical movements in interwar Europe quickly reveals that they would have been inconceivable without the precedent set by Lenin and Stalin. The subject is strangely ignored by historians and political scientists who treat European totalitarian dictatorships as if they were self-generated: even Karl Bracher, in his standard account of Hitler’s rise to power makes virtually no reference to Lenin, although his narrative at all stages reveals the analogies in the methods employed by the two men.³

Why is the Soviet experience largely ignored in the literature on Fascism and totalitarianism? For historians of the left even to raise the question of affinities between Soviet Communism and “Fascism” is tantamount to conceding the possibility of a causal relationship. Since “Fascism” for them is by definition the antithesis of socialism and Communism, no such affinities can be admitted and the sources of “Fascism” must be sought exclusively in conservative ideas and capitalist practices. In the Soviet Union this trend went so far that under Lenin, Stalin, and their immediate successors it was forbidden to use the term “National Socialist.”

Secondly, in the 1920s, when the concepts “totalitarianism” and “Fascism” gained currency, Western scholars knew very little about the Bolsheviks and the one-party dictatorship that they invented. As we have noted,⁴ the foundations of that regime were laid in 1917–18, when Europe, in the final year of World War I, had more urgent matters to claim its attention than internal developments in Russia. The true nature of the Communist regime was long concealed from foreign eyes by novel pseudo-democratic institutions, behind which stood the monopolistic Party. Strange as it may seem today, in the 1920s, “during which the the fascist movements developed, Communism had not yet revealed itself as a totalitarian system … but seemed the advocate of unrestricted freedom.…”⁵ Between the wars, no study subjected the origins of the Communist regime to serious historical and theoretical analysis. The few systematic studies published on Soviet Russia, mostly in the 1930s, described the country under Stalin’s rule, which created the false impression that it was he rather than Lenin who had fathered the one-party dictatorship. As late as 1951 Hannah Arendt could make the astonishing claim that Lenin had originally planned to concentrate power in the soviets and suffered his “greatest defeat” when on the outbreak of the Civil War “the supreme power … passed into the hands of the party bureaucracy.”⁶

Early analyses of the totalitarian phenomenon were written almost exclusively by German scholars on the basis of their own national experience.⁷ This explains the exaggerated importance attached by Hannah Arendt to anti-Semitism as an attribute of totalitarianism.^* Other early writers (like Sigmund Neumann) noted the similarities between the regimes of Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler but even they ignored the Russian influence on right-radical movements for the simple reason that they knew little about the operations of the Communist political system. The first systematic comparison of left-wing and right-wing dictatorships, published in 1956 by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, also provided a static rather than a historical analysis.⁸

The third factor inhibiting inquiries into the influence of Bolshevism on Fascism and National Socialism was the insistence of Moscow on banishing from the vocabulary of “progressive” thought the adjective “totalitarian” in favor of “Fascist” to describe all anti-Communist movements and regimes. The party line on this subject was laid down in the early 1920s and formalized in the resolutions of the Comintern. “Fascism,” a term loosely applied to Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, as well as such relatively benign anti-Communist dictatorships as Antonio Salazar’s in Portugal and Pilsudski’s in Poland, was declared a product of “finance capitalism” and a tool of the bourgeoisie. In the 1920s official Soviet doctrine laid it down that all “capitalist” countries were bound to go through a “Fascist” phase before yielding to Communism (socialism). In the mid-1930s, when Moscow launched the policy of “Popular Fronts,” it softened somewhat its stand on this issue to allow for collaboration with governments and movements that would fall within its definition of “Fascist.” But the view that anti-Communism equals Fascism remained obligatory in countries subject to Communist censorship until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost’. It was prevalent also in foreign “progressive” circles. Western scholars who had the temerity to link Mussolini or Hitler with Communism in any way or to depict their regimes as genuine mass movements risked verbal or other forms of harassment.^*

In the canonical left-wing version, formulated by the Comintern, “Fascism” is the antithesis of Communism, and attempts to bring the two under a common “totalitarian” umbrella are dismissed as by products of the Cold War. In this view, “Fascism” is a facet of the imperialist stage of capitalism that precedes its final collapse. Beleaguered and frightened, “monopoly capitalism” resorts to the “Fascist dictatorship” in a desperate effort to keep the working class under control. The Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1933 defined Fascism as the “overt, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist and imperialist elements of finance capitalism.”⁹ For the committed Marxist, there is no essential difference between parliamentary democracy and “Fascism”: they are merely different ways in which the bourgeoisie maintains itself in power against the wishes of the working masses. “Fascism” is conservative because it preserves existing property relationships: it is “not revolutionary but reactionary or even counterrevolutionary in that it seeks to prevent the natural development to a socialist society.”¹⁰ The revolutionary elements in Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes, so striking to contemporaries, are depicted as deceptive maneuvers.

The arguments against the concept of “totalitarianism,” and against suggestions that Bolshevism influenced “Fascism,” fall into two categories. On the lower polemical level, recourse is had to ad hominem methods. The concept of “totalitarianism” is said to have been devised as a weapon of the Cold War: linking Communism with Nazism helped turn public opinion against the Soviet Union. In reality, this concept antedates the Cold War by a good twenty years. The notions of “total” political power and “Totalitarianism” were formulated in 1923 by an opponent of Mussolini, Giovanni Amendola (later murdered by the Fascists), who, having observed Mussolini’s systematic subversion of state institutions, concluded that his regime differed fundamentally from conventional dictatorships. In 1925, Mussolini adopted the term and assigned it a positive meaning. He defined Fascism as “totalitarian” in the sense that it politicized everything “human” as well as “spiritual”: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”^* In the 1930s, with the rise of Hitler and the concurrent launching of the Stalinist terror, the term gained acceptance in academic circles. All this occurred long before the Cold War.

More serious theorists who reject “totalitarianism” do so on the following grounds: first, no regime has ever been able to enforce complete politicization and state control, and second, features attributed to so-called “totalitarian” regimes are not unique to them.

“Systems that in the strict sense of the word merit the appellation totalitarian do not exist,” so runs the argument, “because there remain everywhere greater or lesser pluralistic residues.” In other words, they fail to achieve that “monolithic unity” which is said to be their distinguishing characteristic.¹¹ To this it can be responded that if terms employed by the social sciences were consistently judged by the criterion of “strict” interpretation then none would pass the test. One could not speak of “capitalism,” since even in the heyday of economic laissez-faire, governments were regulating and otherwise interfering with the operations of the market. Nor under such a standard could one speak of a “Communist economy,” because even though in the Soviet Union it was, in theory, 99 percent state-owned and state-managed, it always had to tolerate a “second,” free economic sector. Democracy means popular rule, yet political theory has no difficulty admitting the existence in the most democratic countries of special interest groups that influence policy. Such concepts are useful because they convey what a given system aspires to and what it achieves—not “strictly,” in terms of its dictionary definition, as is done in the natural sciences, but broadly speaking, which is the maximum consistency attainable in human affairs. In practice, all political, economic and social systems are “mixed”; none is pure. The scholar’s task is to identify those qualities that, in their aggregate, distinguish a given system and set it apart from the others. There are no valid intellectual grounds for holding “totalitarianism” to a more rigid standard. Indeed, totalitarian aspirations are so exorbitant that according to Hans Buchheim, they are by their very nature incapable of realization:

Because totalitarian rule aims at the impossible—to control man’s personality and fate completely—it can be realized only in part. It is of the totalitarian essence that the goal is never reached and actualized but must remain a trend, a claim to power.… Totalitarian rule is no uniformly rationalized apparatus, equally effective in all its parts. Such is the desired state, and in some areas actuality may approach the ideal; but seen as a whole, the totalitarian claim to power is realized only in a diffused way, with varying intensity at different times in the different areas of life—and in the process, totalitarian traits are always mingled with non-totalitarian ones. But it is for this very reason that the effects of the totalitarian claim to power are so dangerous and oppressive; they are vague, incalculable, and hard to prove.… Almost every observation made about a totalitarian measure has the fatal peculiarity of exaggerating the matter in some respects and underestimating it in others. This paradox follows from the unrealizable claim to control; it is characteristic for life under totalitarian governments and renders it so extraordinarily incomprehensible to all outsiders.¹²

A similar response can be given to those who argue that features attributed to totalitarianism (like commitment to ideology, mass appeal, and charismatic leadership) exist also in other political regimes:

The argument of historical uniqueness of any configuration does not mean that it is “wholly” unique; for nothing is. All historical phenomena belong to broad classes of analytic objects.… History is primarily concerned with individualities, whether these be persons, things or events, and a sufficiently variegated pattern of distinctive elements therefore constitutes historical uniqueness.¹³

The study of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism is highly relevant for the understanding of the Russian Revolution for at least three reasons. First, Mussolini and Hitler used the specter of Communism to frighten their populations into surrendering to them dictatorial powers. Secondly, both men learned a great deal from Bolshevik techniques in building up a party personally loyal to them to seize power and establish a one-party dictatorship. In both these respects, Communism had a greater impact on “Fascism” than on socialism and the labor movement. And thirdly, the literature on Fascism and National Socialism is richer and more sophisticated than that on Communism: acquaintance with it sheds much light on the regime that emerged from the Russian Revolution.

Influences are treacherous terrain for the historian because of the risk of falling into the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: “after it, therefore because of it.” Communism cannot be said to have “caused” Fascism and National Socialism, since their sources were indigenous. What can be said is that once antidemocratic forces in postwar Italy and Germany gathered sufficient strength, their leaders had a ready model at hand to follow. All the attributes of totalitarianism had antecedents in Lenin’s Russia: an official, allembracing ideology; a single party of the elect headed by a “leader” and dominating the state; police terror; the ruling party’s control of the means of communication and the armed forces; central command of the economy.^* Since these institutions and procedures were in place in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s when Mussolini founded his regime and Hitler his party, and were to be found nowhere else, the burden of proving there was no connection between “Fascism” and Communism rests on those who hold this opinion.

No prominent European socialist before World War I resembled Lenin more closely than Benito Mussolini. Like Lenin, he headed the antirevisionist wing of the country’s Socialist Party; like him, he believed that the worker was not by nature a revolutionary and had to be prodded to radical action by an intellectual elite. However, working in an environment more favorable to his ideas, he did not need to form a splinter party: whereas Lenin, leading a minority wing, had to break away, Mussolini gained a majority in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and ejected the reformists. Had it not been for his reversal, in 1914, of his stand on the war, coming out in favor of Italy’s entry on the Allied side, which resulted in his expulsion from the PSI, he might well have turned into an Italian Lenin. Socialist historians, embarrassed by these facts of Mussolini’s early biography, have either suppressed them or described them as a passing flirtation with socialism by a man whose true intellectual mentor was not Marx, but Nietzsche and Sorel.^† Such claims, however, are difficult to reconcile with the fact that Italian socialists thought well enough of the future leader of Fascism to name him in 1912 editor in chief of the Party’s organ, Avanti!¹⁴ Far from having a fleeting romance with socialism, Mussolini was fanatically committed to it: until November 1914, and in some respects until early 1920, his ideas on the nature of the working class, the structure and function of the party, and the strategy of the socialist revolution were remarkably like Lenin’s.

Mussolini was born in Romagna, Italy’s most radical province, the son of an impoverished artisan of anarcho-syndicalist and Marxist beliefs. His father taught him that mankind was divided into two classes, the exploited and the exploiters. (This is a formula Mussolini used as socialist leader: “There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters”—sfruttati and sfruttatori.)¹⁵ He was of much humbler origins than the founder of Bolshevism, and his radicalism was of a more proletarian nature. He was not a theoretician but a tactician, whose intellectual eclecticism, a blend of anarchism and Marxism, as well as his emphasis on violence, resembled the ideology of the Russian Socialists-Revolutionaries. In 1902, at the age of 19, he moved to Switzerland, where he spent two years in extreme poverty working as a casual laborer and studying in his spare time.^* During this time he mingled with radical intellectuals: it is possible, though not certain, that he met with Lenin.^† According to Angelica Balabanoff, who saw him frequently during this period, he was a vain egocentric, with tendencies toward hysteria, whose radicalism was rooted in poverty and hatred of the rich.¹⁶ It was then that he developed an abiding hostility to reformist, evolutionary socialism.

Like Lenin, he saw in conflict the distinguishing quality of politics. The “class struggle” meant to him warfare in the literal sense of the word: it was bound to assume violent forms because no ruling class ever peacefully surrendered its wealth and power. He admired Marx, whom he called a “father and teacher,” not for his economics and sociology, but for being the “grand philosopher of worker violence.”¹⁷ He despised “lawyer socialists” who pretended to advance the cause by parliamentary maneuvers. Nor did he have faith in trade unionism, which he believed diverted labor from the class struggle. In 1912, in a passage that could have come from the pen of Lenin, he wrote: “A worker who is merely organized turns into a petty bourgeois who obeys only the voice of interest. Every appeal to ideals leaves him deaf.”¹⁸ He remained faithful to this view even after abandoning socialism: in 1921, as Fascist leader, he would describe workers as “by nature … piously and fundamentally pacifistic.”¹⁹ Thus, independently of Lenin, in both his socialist and his Fascist incarnation he repudiated what Russian radicals called “spontaneity”: left to his own devices, the worker would not make a revolution but strike a deal with the capitalist, which was the quintessence of Lenin’s social theory.^*

These premises confronted Mussolini with the same problem that faced Lenin: how to make a revolution with a class said to be inherently unrevolutionary. He solved it, as did Lenin, by calling for the creation of an elite party to inject into labor the spirit of revolutionary violence. Whereas Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party came from the experience of the People’s Will, Mussolini’s was shaped by the writings of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who in the 1890s and early 1900s popularized the view of politics as contests for power among elite groups. Mosca and Pareto were influenced by contemporary philosophical doctrines, notably those of Henri Bergson, which rejected positivist notions of “objective” factors as decisive in social behavior in favor of voluntarism. But the main impetus for such elite theories came from observation of democratic practices toward the end of the nineteenth century, which suggested that democracy did not work. Not only were continental democracies racked by continuous parliamentary crises and scandals—Italy had in the decade of the 1890s six different ministries—but evidence accumulated that democratic institutions served as a facade that concealed domination by oligarchic minorities. On the basis of these observations, Mosca and Pareto formulated theories that would have profound influence on European politics after World War I. The concept of “elitism” in politics has by now been sufficiently absorbed into the mainstream of Western thinking to seem commonplace: according to Carl Friedrich, the elite theory has been a “dominant theme in the history of Western thought in the last three generations.”²⁰ But at the turn of the century it was a strikingly novel idea: in his Ruling Class, Mosca admitted that it was “rather difficult to grant, as a constant and natural fact, that minorities rule majorities, rather than majorities minorities”:

The dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. At the same time, the minority is organized for the very reason that it is a minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.^*

Once he had decided that the working class was inherently reformist (“economic organizations [trade unions] are reformist because economic reality is reformist”) and that under every political system it is a minority that rules, Mussolini concluded that if labor was to be revolutionized, it required “an aristocracy of intelligence and will” to lead it.²¹ He espoused such ideas as early as 1904.²²

On these premises Mussolini proceeded to remake the Italian Socialist Party. In La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle), which he founded in 1910, he hounded the reformist majority much as Lenin did the Mensheviks, although with less recourse to slander. Lenin would have had no hesitation in signing his name to Mussolini’s editorial in the first issue of this newspaper:

Socialism is coming, and the measure of socialism’s realization in the bosom of the existing civil society is provided not by political conquests—the frequently illusory principles of the Socialist Party—but by the number, power, and consciousness of worker associations, which already today form the nuclei of the communist organization of the future. And the working class, as Karl Marx says in his Misery of Philosophy, will replace in the course of its development the old civil society with an association that will eliminate classes and their conflicts.… In the expectation of this, the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle that, carried to its highest expression, is total revolution.… The expropriation of the bourgeoisie will be the final result of this struggle and the working class will have no difficulty initiating production on a communist base inasmuch as already today, in its trade unions, it readies the weapons, the institutions, the men for this war and this conquest.… Socialist workers must form the vanguard, vigilant and combative, that spurs the mass never to forget the vision of the ideal goal.… Socialism is not an affair of merchants, not a game for politicians, not a dream of romantics: less still is it a sport. It as an effort at a moral and material uplifting, both individual and collective, and perhaps the mightiest drama that has agitated the human collective, and certainly the most cherished hope of millions of human beings who suffer and want no longer to vegetate but to live.²³

Exploiting the frustrated radicalism of the rank-and-file, Mussolini succeeded at the Socialist Party’s Congress of 1912 in ousting the moderates from the leadership. His followers, known as “Mussoliniani,” included some of the luminaries of future Italian Communism, among them Antonio Gramsci.²⁴ He was appointed to the Party’s Executive Committee and entrusted with the editorship of Avanti! Lenin welcomed on the pages of Pravda the victory of Mussolini’s faction: “A split is a difficult, painful affair. But sometimes it is necessary, and in such circumstances every weakness, every ‘sentimentality’ … is a crime.… And the Party of the Italian socialist proletariat, by expelling from its midst the syndicalists and right reformists, took the correct path.”²⁵

In 1912, Mussolini, one year short of 30, seemed destined to head Italy’s revolutionary socialists, or “intransigents,” as they were called. In fact this did not happen, because of his reversal on the issue of Italy’s participation in the war.

Like Lenin, Mussolini had threatened before 1914 that if the government declared war, the socialists would respond with civil violence. In 1911, after it had sent troops to Tripolitania (Libya), he warned that the socialists were prepared to transform the “war between nations into a war between classes.”²⁶ The means to this end was to be the general strike. He repeated this warning on the eve of World War I: if Italy abandoned neutrality to join the Central Powers against the Allies, he wrote in August 1914, it would confront a proletarian uprising.²⁷ The historian of Fascism Ernst Nolte, for some reason ignoring Lenin, claims that Mussolini was the only prominent European socialist to threaten his government with rebellion if it went to war.²⁸

The outbreak of hostilities and the wholly unexpected willingness of European socialists to vote for war credits shook Mussolini’s self-assurance: in November 1914, to the astonishment of his associates, he came out in favor of Italy’s participation on the Allied side. He matched words with deeds, joining the army as a foot soldier and fighting until February 1917, when he suffered serious wounds and was sent to the rear.

Various explanations have been advanced for this about-face, which resulted in Mussolini’s expulsion from the Socialist Party. The least charitable holds that he was bribed—that he came under strong pressure from French socialists, who provided him with money to publish his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. The suggestion is that, in effect, Mussolini sold out. It is more likely, however, that his motives were political. After nearly all European socialist parties had violated their pacifist pledges and backed their governments’ entry into the war, he seems to have concluded that nationalism was more potent fare than socialism. In December 1914, he wrote:

The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that it was annihilated. Instead, we see it rise, living, palpitating before us! And understandably so. The new reality does not suppress the truth: class cannot destroy the nation. Class is a collectivity of interests, but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, ancestry. You can insert the class into the nation, but they do not destroy each other.²⁹

From this it followed that the Socialist Party must lead not only the proletariat, but the entire nation: it must create “un socialismo nazionale.” Certainly, in 1914 the shift from international socialism to national socialism made good sense for an ambitious West European demagogue.³⁰ Mussolini remained loyal to the idea of violent revolution led by an elite party, but henceforth his was to be a national revolution.

One can also explain his reversal by strategic considerations, namely the conviction that a revolution required an international war. This opinion was common among Italian socialists-interventionists, as illustrated by the following reflections in Avanti! by the left-extremist Sergio Panunzio (later a prominent theoretician of Fascism) two months after the outbreak of hostilities:

I am firmly convinced that only the present war—and the more acute and prolonged it is—will unleash in Europe socialism of revolutionary action.… External wars must be followed by internal wars, the former must prepare the latter, and jointly prepare the great, luminous day of socialism.… All of us are convinced that for socialism to happen it must be wanted. This is the moment of wanting and having. If socialism is inert and … neutral, tomorrow the historical situation may only reaffirm a state of affairs similar to the present one, but it may objectively turn in a sense more remote and contrary to socialism.… We are, all of us, certain that all the states—and how much more so the bourgeois states—after the war, victors and vanquished [alike], will lie prostrate, with broken bones.… All of them will be, in some measure, defeated.… Capitalism will be so profoundly damaged that a coup de grâce will suffice.… He who supports the cause of peace, supports, unconsciously, the cause of preserving capitalism.^*

Such a positive attitude toward the war was not unknown to Russian socialists, especially those on the extreme left, although they rarely spoke so frankly. There is evidence that Lenin welcomed the outbreak of World War I and hoped that it would be long and devastating. While attacking the international “bourgeoisie” for the carnage, privately Lenin applauded its self-destruction. In January 1913, during a Balkan crisis, he wrote Maxim Gorky: “A war between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the revolution (throughout Eastern Europe) but it is unlikely that Franz Joseph and Nikolashka [Nicholas II] will grant us this pleasure.”³¹ Throughout World War I Lenin rejected all manifestations of pacifism in the Russian and international socialist movements, insisting that the mission of socialists was not to stop the war but to transform it into a civil conflict, that is, revolution.

One must, therefore, agree with Domenico Settembrini that Mussolini’s and Lenin’s attitudes toward the war showed close affinities, even though the one favored his country’s participation and the other opposed it, at any rate publicly:

While [both Lenin and Mussolini] realized that the party could be instrumental in radicalizing the masses and shaping their responses, it could, on its own, not create the basic preconditions for revolution—the collapse of the capitalist social order. Whatever Marx said about the spirit of revolution automatically emerging from the impoverishment of the proletariat and the consequent inability of capitalism to sell its goods to a shrinking market, the fact was that the proletariat was not getting poorer, that the spirit of revolution was conspicuous by its absence, and the capitalist order was expanding rather than facing bankruptcy. A substitute had, therefore, to be found for Marx’s supposed self-triggering mechanism, and that substitute was—war.^*

Mussolini continued to think of himself as a socialist as late as 1919, the year he founded the Fascist Party. The country, teeming with veterans unable to find work, and suffering from inflation, faced serious social unrest. Hundreds of thousands of workers were on strike. Mussolini encouraged these disturbances. In January 1919, he incited an unlawful work stoppage of postal employees and urged workers to seize factories. According to one authority, in the summer of 1919, when social turbulence was at its height, he went to great lengths to outbid the ineffectual Socialist Party and General Federation of Labor with appeals to industrial violence: his Popolo d’Italia called for profiteers to be “strung up on lampposts.”³² The June 1919 program of the fasci di combattimento, which formed the nucleus of the Fascist Party, hardly deviated from that of the socialists: Constituent Assembly, eight-hour working day, worker participation in industrial management, national militia, partial expropriation of wealth by means of a “heavy tax on capital,” and confiscation of church properties. The workers were exhorted to launch a “revolutionary war.”³³ Experts in the Socialist Party regarded Mussolini as a “socialista rivoluzionario.”³⁴

With these actions, the onetime socialist leader, discredited by his stand on the war, hoped to regain his position in the PSI. The socialists, however, would not forgive him: they were willing to enter into joint electoral blocs with the Fascists, but only on condition that they excluded Mussolini.³⁵ Isolated politically and backed mainly by socialists-interventionists, Mussolini swung to the right. His evolution during the two postwar years indicates that it was not he who rejected the socialists, but the socialists who rejected him, and that he founded the Fascist movement as a vehicle for political ambitions that could not be accommodated in his old home, the Socialist Party. His break with socialism, in other words, was not ideological but personal.

Beginning in late 1920, armed Fascist rowdies moved into the countryside to beat up peasant squatters. Early the following year, they organized “punitive expeditions” to terrorize the smaller towns of northern Italy. In a manner reminiscent of Bolshevik practices, they disbanded socialist parties and trade unions by means of physical violence and threats. Like their Russian counterparts, the Italian socialists reacted passively to such strong-arm methods, leaving their followers confused and demoralized. With these actions Mussolini earned the support of industrialists and landowners. He also exploited Italian resentment over the peace settlement: for although Italy had fought on the side of the victorious Allies, her territorial demands had gone largely unsatisfied. Mussolini played on popular anger by depicting Italy as a “proletarian nation”: this tactic won him a following among embittered war veterans. By November 1921, the Fascist Party had 152,000 members, of whom 24 percent were agricultural laborers and 15 percent industrial workers.³⁶

Even as the Fascist leader, Mussolini never concealed his sympathy and admiration for Communism: he thought highly of Lenin’s “brutal energy,” and saw nothing objectionable in Bolshevik massacres of hostages.³⁷ He proudly claimed Italian Communism as his child. In his maiden speech on June 21, 1921, in the Chamber of Deputies, he boasted: “I know [the Communists] very well, for some of them are of my making; I admit with a sincerity that may appear cynical that I was the first to infect these people when I introduced into Italian socialism a little Bergson diluted with plenty of Blanqui.”³⁸ Of Bolshevism he had this to say in February 1921: “I reject all forms of Bolshevism, but if I had to choose one it would be that of Moscow and Lenin, if only because its proportions are gigantic, barbaric, universal.”³⁹ It could hardly have been an oversight that he allowed the Communist Party to survive for a time the November 1926 decree banning independent political parties, associations, and organizations.⁴⁰ As late as 1932, Mussolini acknowledged Fascism’s affinities with Communism: “In the whole negative part, we are alike. We and the Russians are against the liberals, against democrats, against parliament.”⁴¹ (Hitler would later agree, saying that there was more that connected than separated the Nazis from the Bolsheviks.⁴²) In 1933, Mussolini publicly urged Stalin to follow the Fascist model, and in 1938, when the Soviet dictator had completed the most horrendous bloodbath in history, he bestowed on him the ultimate accolade: “In the face of the total collapse of the system of Lenin, Stalin has become a secret Fascist,” with the difference that, being a Russian, “that is, a species of semi-barbarian,” he did not emulate the Fascists’ use of forced feeding of castor oil to punish their prisoners.⁴³

The Russian Communists anxiously watched first Mussolini and then Hitler copy their political techniques. At the Twelfth Party Congress (1923), when such comparisons were still possible, Bukharin observed:

It is characteristic of Fascist methods of combat that they, more than any other party, have adopted and applied in practice the experiences of the Russian Revolution. If one regards them from the formal point of view, that is, from the point of view of the technique of their political methods, then one discovers in them a complete application of Bolshevik tactics, and especially those of Russian Bolshevism, in the sense of the rapid concentration of forces [and] energetic action of a tightly structured military organization, in the sense of a particular system of committing one’s forces, uchraspredy, mobilization, etc., and the pitiless destruction of the enemy, whenever this is necessary and demanded by the circumstances.^*

The historical evidence thus indicates that Mussolini’s Fascism did not emerge as a right-wing reaction to socialism or communism, even if, to promote his political interests, Mussolini did not hesitate to attack both movements.^† Given the opportunity, Mussolini would have been glad as late as 1920–21 to take under his wing the Italian Communists, for whom he felt great affinities: greater, certainly, than for democratic socialists, liberals, and conservatives. Generically, Fascism issued from the “Bolshevik” wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement.

Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism. National Socialism grew from different seeds. If Lenin came from the highest stratum of the Russian service nobility and Mussolini from the ranks of the impoverished artisan class, Hitler was of petty-bourgeois background and spent his youth in an atmosphere permeated with hostility toward socialism and hatred of Jews. Unlike Mussolini and Lenin, both avid readers familiar with contemporary political and social theories, Hitler was an ignoramus who picked up what he knew from observation, casual reading, and conversations: he had no theoretical grounding, but only opinions and prejudices. Even so, the political ideology he was to use with such deadly effect, first to eliminate freedom in Germany and then to sow death and destruction across Europe, was deeply affected by the Russian Revolution, negatively as well as positively. Negatively, the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia and its attempts to revolutionize Europe provided Hitler with a justification for his visceral anti-Semitism, and the specter of a “Judeo-Communist” conspiracy with which to frighten the German people. Positively, it helped him in his quest for dictatorial power by teaching him the techniques of crowd manipulation and furnishing him with the model for a one-party, totalitarian state.

Anti-Semitism occupied in the ideology and psychology of National Socialism a unique place as a central and undeviating objective. Although the origins of Judeophobia go back to classical antiquity, the insanely destructive forms it assumed under Hitler had no historic precedent. To understand this, it is necessary to note the effect of the Russian Revolution on Russian and German nationalist movements.

Traditional, pre-twentieth-century anti-Semitism was primarily driven by religious hostility: the perception of Jews as the killers of Christ and a malevolent people who stubbornly rejected the Christian gospel. Propagated by the Catholic Church and some Protestant sects, this hostility was reinforced by economic competition and dislike of Jews as money-lenders and canny merchants. To the traditional anti-Semite, the Jew was the member neither of a “race” nor of a transnational community, but the follower of a false religion, doomed to suffer and wander homeless as a lesson to mankind. For the idea of Jews as an international menace to take hold, an international community had to come into existence. This happened in the course of the nineteenth century with the emergence of global commerce and global communications. Transcending regional and national boundaries, these developments directly affected the lives of communities and nations that until modern times had led fairly sheltered and self-contained existences. Suddenly and inexplicably, people began to feel they were losing control of their lives. When the harvest in Russia could affect the livelihood of farmers in the United States, or the discovery of gold in California, prices in Europe, when a political movement like international socialism could set as its goal overthrowing all existing regimes, no one could feel safe: and insecurity induced by international events quite naturally gave rise to the notion of international conspiracy. And who could better fill this role than the Jews, who not only belonged to the most visible international group, but occupied prominent positions in global finance and the media?

The vision of Jewry as a disciplined supranational community, commanded by a body of invisible superiors, first emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. For although Jews played no part in it, counterrevolutionary ideologists saw them as culprits, in part because they benefited from revolutionary legislation granting them civic equality, and in part because they were popularly linked with the Masonic movement, which French royalists blamed for 1789. By the 1870s, German extremists claimed that all Jews, whatever their citizenship, were governed by a secret international organization: this was usually identified with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, based in Paris, an institution whose actual mission was philanthropy. Such ideas became popular in France during the 1890s in connection with the Dreyfus affair. Prior to the Russian Revolution anti-Semitism gained widespread acceptance in Europe, mainly in reaction to the appearance of Jews as equals in societies that had been accustomed to treating them as a pariah caste, and from disappointment that even after being emancipated, they refused to assimilate. Jews were disliked for what was seen as their clannishness and secretiveness, their allegedly “parasitic” economic pursuits, and their Levantine manners. But they were not feared. The fear of the Jew came with the Russian Revolution, and turned out to be one of its most disastrous legacies.

The work that bears the greatest responsibility for this development is the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery that, in the words of its historian, Norman Cohn, provided the “warrant” for Hitler’s genocide.⁴⁴ The author of this fabrication has not been identified, but it apparently was compiled in the late 1890s in France from anti-Semitic tracts published during the Dreyfus affair under the stimulus of the first international Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897. The Paris branch of the tsarist Okhrana, the Russian secret police, seems to have had a hand in it. The book purports to reveal the secret resolutions of meetings held by the leaders of international Jewry at an unspecified time and place, allegedly obtained from a participant, to formulate a strategy for the subjugation of Christian nations and the establishment of Jewish dominion over the world. The means toward this supposed end was the fomenting of strife among Christians: sometimes by stirring worker unrest, sometimes by promoting the arms race and war, and always by encouraging moral depravity. The Jewish state that would emerge once this objective had been attained would be a despotism maintained with the help of a ubiquitous police: a society deprived of freedom but not lacking in social benefits, including full employment, to keep it docile.

The so-called “Protocols” were first published in 1902 in a St. Petersburg periodical. Three years later, during the 1905 Revolution, they came out in book form edited by Sergei Nilus under the title The Great in the Small and Anti-Christ. Other Russian editions followed, but there was as yet no foreign translation. Even in Russia it seems to have attracted little attention: Nilus, its most assiduous propagator, complained that no one took the book seriously.⁴⁵

It was the Russian Revolution that launched the Protocols on its spectacular career. World War I left Europeans in a state of utter bewilderment, eager to find culprits to blame for the carnage. For the left, the conspirators responsible for World War I were the “capitalists,” and especially the manufacturers of weapons: the charge that capitalism inevitably led to war won the Communists many adherents. Such was one version of the conspiracy notion.

The other, prevalent among conservatives, pointed to the Jew. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who bore greater responsibility for World War I than anyone else, blamed it on the Jews while the fighting was still in progress.⁴⁶ General Erich Ludendorff claimed that Jews had not only helped England and France to bring Germany to her knees, but “perhaps directed both”:

The leadership of the Jewish people … saw in the coming world war a means of realizing its political and economic objectives, to win for Jews in Palestine a state territory and recognition as a nation, and to win for themselves in Europe and America suprastatal and supracapitalist hegemony. On the road to realizing this goal, the Jews in Germany strove to attain the same position as in those countries [England and France] that had already surrendered to them. To this end, the Jewish people required the defeat of Germany.⁴⁷

This “explanation” echoes the Protocols and was, without a doubt, inspired by them.

Bolshevik outrages, and the open incitement to world revolution by a regime in which Jews were highly visible, occurred at a time when Western opinion was looking for scapegoats. It became common after the war, especially among the middle classes and professional people, to identify Communism with a global Jewish conspiracy, and to interpret it as the realization of the program presented in the Protocols. While common sense might balk at the proposition that Jews were responsible for both “supracapitalism” and its enemy, Communism, the dialectic of the Protocols was flexible enough to accommodate such contradictions. Since the ultimate objective of the Jews was said to be subverting the gentile world, they could act, depending on the circumstances, now as capitalists, now as Communists. It was all a matter of tactics. Indeed, according to the author or authors of the Protocols, to bring their own “lesser brothers” into line, the Jews even had recourse to anti-Semitism and pogroms.^*

After the Bolsheviks had seized power and unleashed their reign of terror, the Protocols acquired the status of prophecy. Once it became public knowledge that among prominent Bolsheviks were Jews hiding behind Slavic aliases, the whole thing seemed to become perfectly clear: the October Revolution and the Communist regime were decisive breakthroughs in the Jewish quest for world domination. The Spartacist putsches, the Communist “republics” in Hungary and Bavaria, in which many Jews were involved, were seen to mark the extension of Jewish power outside their Russian base. To prevent the prophecy of the Protocols from being fulfilled, Christians (“Aryans”) had to realize the danger and unite against their common enemy.

The Protocols gained popularity in Russia during the terrors of 1918–19: among its readers was Nicholas II.^* Its readership expanded after the murder of the Imperial family, which was widely blamed on Jews. When in the winter of 1919–20 thousands of defeated White officers sought refuge in Western Europe, some carried copies of the forgery. It served their interests to popularize the book to warn Europeans, on the whole rather indifferent to their fate, that Communism was not a Russian problem but the first phase of a world Communist revolution that would deliver them, too, into Jewish hands.

The most notorious of these émigrés was F. V. Vinberg, a Russian officer of German ancestry, whose obsession with Jews assumed manic proportions.⁴⁸ He saw the Russian Revolution as the handiwork of Jews and Jews alone: in one of his publications he supplied a spurious list of Soviet officials, virtually every one of whom was said to be a Jew.⁴⁹ Such views quickly gained acceptance in German right-wing circles, which were embittered by defeat and unnerved by Communist insurrections. It was Vinberg who, jointly with a notorious German Judeophobe, brought out the first translation of the Protocols in Germany. Published in January 1920, it was an instant success. In the next few years, Germany was flooded with hundreds of thousands of copies: Norman Cohn estimates that by the time Hitler took power, there were at least 28 editions in circulation in Germany.⁵⁰ Before long, translations appeared in Swedish, English, French, Polish; other foreign-language versions followed. In the 1920s, the Protocols became an international best-seller.

Especially receptive to its message was the fledgling German National Socialist Party, which from its inception in 1919 professed rabid anti-Semitism but lacked for it a theoretical foundation. The earliest Nazi platform, published in 1919, designated as Germany’s enemies first the Jews, then the Versailles Treaty, and thirdly the “Marxists,” by which were meant the Social-Democrats, not the Communists, with whom the Nazis maintained friendly contacts.⁵¹ The connection between Jewry and Communism was established with the help of the Protocols, which are said to have been brought to Hitler’s attention by Alfred Rosenberg. A Baltic German who had studied architecture in Russia, carried a Russian passport, and spoke Russian better than German, Rosenberg became converted to Vinberg’s ideas and grafted them onto the Nazi movement, whose chief ideologist he became. Vinberg convinced him that the Russian Revolution had been engineered by world Jewry to gain global dominion. The Protocols made on the future Führer an overwhelming impression. “I have read the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’—it simply appalled me,” he told Hermann Rauschning, an early associate, “the stealthiness of the enemy, and his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy it—in our own way, of course.”⁵² According to Rauschning, the Protocols served Hitler as a major source of political inspiration.⁵³ Hitler thus used a spurious manual of Jewish strategy for world domination, not only to depict the Jews as the mortal enemy of Germany, but to carry out his own quest for world domination employing its methods. He so admired the alleged cunning of Jews in their drive to master the world that he decided to adopt fully their “ideology” and “program.”⁵⁴

It was only after he had read the Protocols that Hitler turned anti-Communist:

Rosenberg left a permanent mark on Nazi ideology. The party was rabidly antisemitic from the moment of its foundation in 1919, but it became obsessed with Russian communism only in 1921–22; and this seems to have been largely Rosenberg’s doing. He provided the link between Russian antisemitism of the Black Hundred type and the antisemitism of the German racists; more precisely, he took over Vinberg’s view of Bolshevism as a Jewish conspiracy and reinterpreted it in völkisch-racist terms. The resulting fantasy, as expounded in innumerable articles and pamphlets, became an obsessive theme in Hitler’s thinking and in the outlook and propaganda of the Nazi party.⁵⁵

It has been said that Hitler had only two major political objectives: the destruction of Jewry and the expansion into the East European Lebensraum (“Living Space”), all other elements of his program, capitalist as well as socialist, being only means to these ends.⁵⁶ The right-wing Russian theory linking Jews with Communism allowed him to connect these two objectives.

Thus the ravings of extremist Russian monarchists, who sought and found a scapegoat for the catastrophe that had befallen their country in the “hidden hand” of world Jewry, injected themselves into the political ideology of a party destined before long to acquire total power in Germany. The rationale for the Nazi extermination of Jews came from Russian right-wing circles: it was Vinberg and his friends who first called publicly for the physical extermination of Jews.⁵⁷ The Jewish Holocaust thus turned out to be one of the many unanticipated and unintended consequences of the Russian Revolution.

As a political phenomenon, Nazism was two things: a technique of manipulating the masses to give the appearance of popular participation in the political process; and a system of government in which the German National Socialist Labor Party monopolized power and transformed the institutions of the state into its instruments. In both instances the influence of Marxism in both its original and Bolshevik guises was unmistakable.

It is known that in his youth Hitler closely studied how Social Democrats managed crowds: “From the Social Democrats Hitler derived the idea of a mass party and mass propaganda. In Mein Kampf he describes the impression made on him when [he] ‘gazed on the interminable ranks, four abreast, of Viennese workmen parading at a mass demonstration. I stood dumbfounded for almost two hours, watching this enormous human dragon which slowly uncoiled itself before me.’ ”^* From such observations Hitler developed his theory of crowd psychology, which he later used with remarkable success. In a conversation with Rauschning, he conceded his debt to socialism:

I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit. I don’t mean their tiresome social doctrine or the materialist conception of history, or their absurd “marginal utility” theories [!], and so on. But I have learned from their methods. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and penpushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it. Look at the workers’ sports clubs, the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda leaflets written specially for the comprehension of the masses; all these new methods of political struggle are essentially Marxist in origin. All I had to do is take over these methods and adapt them to our purpose. I only had to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.⁵⁸

And, one may add, what Bolshevism did, and what it became.^†

One channel for transmitting Communist models to the Nazi movement were right-wing intellectuals with a left-wing bent close to Hitler, known as “National Bolsheviks.”^‡ Their chief theoreticians, Joseph Goebbels and Otto Strasser, greatly impressed by Bolshevik successes in Russia, wanted Germany to help Soviet Russia build up her economy in return for her political support against France and England. To the argument of Rosenberg, adopted by Hitler, that Moscow was the headquarters of an international Jewish conspiracy, they responded that Communism was a facade that concealed traditional Russian nationalism: “They say world revolution and mean Russia.”^* But the “National Bolsheviks” desired more than cooperation with Communist Russia: they wanted Germany to adopt her system of government by centralizing political power, eliminating rival political parties, and restricting the operations of the free market. In 1925, Goebbels and Strasser argued in the Nazi daily, Völkischer Beobachter, that only the introduction of a “socialist dictatorship” could save Germany from chaos. “Lenin sacrificed Marx,” Goebbels wrote, “and in return gave Russia freedom.”⁵⁹ Of his own Nazi Party, he wrote in 1929 that it was a party of “revolutionary socialists.”⁶⁰

Hitler rejected this ideology, but he followed it to the extent of using socialist slogans to wean German workers away from the Social Democrats. The adjectives “Socialist” and “Labor” in the title of the Nazi Party were not simply fraudulent exploitations of popular words. The party grew from a union of German workers in Bohemia formed in the early years of the century to fight the competition of Czech migrants. The program of the German Labor Party (Deutsche Arbeiter Partei), as this organization originally called itself, combined socialism, anticapitalism, and anticlericalism with German nationalism. In 1918, it renamed itself the German National Socialist Labor Party (DNSAP), adding anti-Semitism to its platform and luring to its ranks demobilized war veterans, shopkeepers, and professional personnel. (The word “Labor” in its name was meant to include “all who work,” not only industrial laborers.⁶¹) It was this organization that Hitler took over in 1919. According to Bracher, the ideology of the party in its early years “contained a thoroughly revolutionary kernel within an irrational, violence-oriented political ideology. It was in no sense a mere expression of reactionary tendencies: it derived from the world of workers and trade unionists.”⁶² The Nazis appealed to the socialist traditions of German labor, declaring the worker “a pillar of the community,” and the “bourgeois”—along with the traditional aristocracy—a doomed class.⁶³ Hitler, who told associates that he was a “socialist,”⁶⁴ had the party adopt the red flag and, on coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday; Nazi Party members were ordered to address one another as “comrades” (Genossen). His conception of the party was, like Lenin’s, that of a militant organization, a Kampfbund, or “Combat League.” (“A supporter of a movement is he who declares his agreement with its aims. A member is only he who fights for it.”⁶⁵) His ultimate aim was a society in which traditional classes would be abolished, and status earned by personal heroism.⁶⁶ In typically radical fashion, he envisaged man re-creating himself: “Man is becoming god,” he told Rauschning. “Man is god in the making.”⁶⁷

The Nazis at first had little success in attracting workers, and their ranks were dominated by “petty bourgeois” elements. But toward the end of the 1920s, their socialist appeals began to have an effect. When unemployment struck in 1929–30, workers joined en masse. According to Nazi Party records, in 1930, 28 percent of the Party’s membership consisted of industrial workers; in 1934, their proportion rose to 32 percent. In both years, they were the largest occupational group in the Nazi Party.^* Given that membership in the Nazi Party did not carry the same responsibilities as that in the Russian Communist Party, it may well be that the proportion of bona fide industrial workers (as distinguished from ex-workers turned into full-time party functionaries) was actually higher in the NSDAP than in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The evidence for Hitler’s model of the totalitarian party being borrowed from Communist Russia is circumstantial: for while he was quite willing to admit his debt to the “Marxists,” Hitler carefully avoided acknowledging any borrowing from Communist Russia. The notion of the one-party state apparently occurred to him in the mid-1920s, when, reflecting on the failure of the Kapp putsch of 1920, he decided to change tactics and take power legally. Hitler himself claimed that the concept of a disciplined, hierarchically organized political party was suggested to him by military organization. He was also willing to grant that he had learned from Mussolini.⁶⁸ But it would be most unusual if the Communist Party, whose activities were widely covered in the German press, did not influence him as well, although for obvious reasons he found this fact impossible to admit. In private conversation he was willing to concede that he had “studied the revolutionary technique in the works of Lenin and Trotsky and other Marxists.”^† According to him, he turned away from the socialists and started something “new” because they were “small men”⁶⁹—incapable of bold action—which is not much different from the reason that caused Lenin to break with the Social Democrats and found the Bolshevik Party.

In the dispute between the adherents of Rosenberg and of Goebbels and Strasser, Hitler in the end sided with the former. There was to be no alliance with Soviet Russia because Hitler needed the specter of the Jewish-Communist threat to frighten the German voters. But this did not prevent him from adopting for his own purposes the central institutions and practices of Communist Russia.

The three totalitarian regimes differed in several respects: their differences will be discussed in due course. What joined them, however, was much more important than what separated them. First and foremost it was the common enemy: liberal democracy with its multiparty system, its respect for law and property, its ideal of peace and stability. Lenin’s, Mussolini’s, and Hitler’s fulminations against “bourgeois democracy” and the Social Democrats are entirely interchangeable.

To analyze the relationship between Communism and “Fascism” one must disabuse oneself of the conventional ideal that a “revolution” is, by its very nature, egalitarian and internationalist, while nationalist upheavals are inherently counterrevolutionary. This was a mistake committed by those German conservatives who initially supported Hitler in the belief that an outspoken nationalist like him could not have revolutionary aspirations.⁷⁰ “Counterrevolution” can be properly applied only to movements that aspire to undo the revolution and restore the status quo ante, as held true of the French Royalists of the 1790s. If “revolution” is defined to mean a sudden overthrow of the existing political regime, followed by fundamental changes in the economy, social structure, and culture, then the term is equally applicable to antiegalitarian and xenophobic upheavals. The adjective “revolutionary” describes not the substance of change but the manner in which it is accomplished—namely, suddenly and violently. Hence it is as proper to speak of right-wing revolutions as of left-wing ones: the fact that the two confront each other as deadly enemies derives from competition over mass constituencies, not from disagreements over methods or objectives. Both Hitler and Mussolini regarded themselves as revolutionaries, and rightly so. Rauschning claimed that National Socialism was actually more revolutionary in its goals than either Communism or anarchism.⁷¹

But perhaps the most fundamental affinity among the three totalitarian movements lay in the realm of psychology: Communism, Fascism and National Socialism exacerbated and exploited popular resentments—class, racial, and ethnic—to win mass support and to reinforce the claim that they, not the democratically elected governments, expressed the true will of the people. All three appealed to the emotion of hate.

The French Jacobins were the first to realize the political potential of class resentment. Exploiting it, they conjured constant conspiracies by aristocrats and other enemies of the revolution: shortly before their fall they drafted legislation expropriating private wealth that had unmistakable communistic implications.⁷² It was from the study of the French Revolution and its aftermath that Marx formulated the theory of class struggle as the dominant feature of history. In his theory, social antagonism was for the first time accorded moral legitimacy: hatred, which Judaism condemned as self-destructive, and Christianity (in the guise of anger) treated as one of the cardinal sins, was made into a virtue. But hatred is a double-edged sword, and before long the victims adopted it for self-protection. Toward the close of the nineteenth century doctrines emerged that exploited ethnic and racial resentments as a counter to the socialist slogan of class war. In a prophetic book of 1902, Doctrines of Hate, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu called attention to the affinities between the left- and right-wing extremists of the day, and foresaw the kind of collusion between them that would become reality after 1917.⁷³

It requires no elaboration that Lenin used resentment of the well-off, the burzhui, to rally the urban plebeians and the poorer peasants. Mussolini reformulated the class struggle as a conflict between “have” and “have-not” nations. Hitler adapted Mussolini’s technique, by reinterpreting the class struggle as strife between races and nations, namely “Aryans” against Jews and the nations allegedly dominated by them.^* An early pro-Nazi political theorist argued that the true conflict of the modern world pitted not labor against capital but states based on the sovereignty of the Volk against global Jewish “imperialism,” which could be solved only if Jews were deprived of the possibility of surviving economically and in this manner exterminated.⁷⁴ Revolutionary movements, whether of the “right” or “left” variety, have to have an object of hatred because it is incomparably easier to rally the masses against a visible enemy than for an abstraction. The matter was theoretically explained and justified by Carl Schmitt, a theoretician close to the Nazis. Writing six years before Hitler’s advent to power, he defined enmity as the defining quality of politics:

The specifically political distinction underpinning political actions and motives is that between friend and foe. It corresponds in the realm of politics to the relatively independent contrasts in other realms: between good and evil in ethics, the beautiful and ugly in aesthetics, and so on. The [distinction between friend and foe] is self-sufficient—that is, it neither derives from one or more of these contrasts nor is reduced to them.… [It] can exist, both in theory and practice, without the concurrent application of other distinctions—moral, aesthetic, economic, and so on. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be very advantageous to do business with him. But he is the other, the stranger; and it is enough that he is, in an especially intensive existential sense, someone different and alien, so that, in the event of a conflict, he represents the negation of one’s own being, and for that reason must be resisted and fought in order to protect one’s self-like (seinmässig) lifestyle.⁷⁵

The message behind this turgid prose is that the political process demands stress on the differences dividing groups, because this is the only way to conjure up the enemies whose existence is indispensable to politics. The “other” need not in fact be an enemy: it is enough that he be perceived as different.

It was the Communists’ addiction to hatred that Hitler found so congenial, and the reason why he instructed the Nazi Party to welcome disenchanted Communists while barring Social Democrats: for hatred was easily redirected from one object to another.⁷⁶ So it happened that in the early 1920s, the largest number of adherents of the Italian Fascist Party were ex-Communists.⁷⁷

We will consider the common features of the three totalitarian regimes under three rubrics: the structure, functions, and authority of the ruling Party; the relationship of the Party to the State; and the Party’s relationship to the population at large.

I. The Ruling Party

Until the Bolshevik dictatorship, a state consisted of a government and the governed (subjects or citizens). Bolshevism introduced a third element, the monopolistic “party” that dominated both government and society while placing itself outside the control of either: a party that was not really a party, that governed without being a government, that ruled the people in their name but without their consent. “One-party state” is a misnomer both because the entity that runs the totalitarian state is not really a party in the accepted sense of the word and because it stands apart from the state. It is the truly distinguishing characteristic of the totalitarian regime, its quintessential attribute. It was the creation of Lenin. The Fascists and the Nazis faithfully copied this model.

A. THE PARTY AS THE ORDER OF THE ELECT

Unlike true political parties, which seek to enlarge their membership, the Communist, Fascist, and Nazi organizations were exclusive in nature. Admission was subject to close scrutiny, which employed such criteria as social origin, race, or age, and the ranks of members were periodically cleansed or “purged” of undesirables. For this reason they resembled “brotherhoods” or “oligarchical fraternities” of the elect, which perpetuated themselves by cooptation. Hitler told Rauschning that “party” was really a misnomer when applied to the NSDAP, which was better called an “order” (Orden).⁷⁸ A Fascist theorist referred to Mussolini’s party as “a church, that is to say, a communion of faith, a union of wills and intentions loyal to a supreme and unique end.”⁷⁹

The three totalitarian organizations were led by outsiders, not members of the traditional ruling groups: loners who either destroyed the latter, as in Russia, or else established themselves as an alternate, parallel privileged estate and in time subordinated them. This quality further distinguishes totalitarian dictatorships from ordinary dictatorships, which do not create their own political machine but rely on the traditional instruments of rule, such as the bureaucracy, the church, and the armed forces.

The Italian Fascists enforced the most rigid standards of admission, restricting membership in the 1920s to fewer than one million. Preference was given to the young, who enrolled after an apprenticeship in youth affiliates, the Ballila and Avanguardia, copies of the Communist Pioneers and Komsomol. In the next decade its ranks expanded, and on the eve of Italy’s defeat in World War II the Fascist Party numbered over 4 million. The Nazis had the loosest admission standards: after trying to keep out “opportunists,” in 1933 they relaxed them and by the time the regime fell, nearly one out of four adult German men (23 percent) was a member.⁸⁰ The policy of the Russian Communist Party lay somewhere in between these two, now expanding ranks to meet administrative and military needs, now thinning them in massive and sometimes bloody purges. In all three cases, however, affiliation was deemed a privilege and enrollment was by invitation.

B. THE LEADER

Because they deny that objective norms should constrain their power, totalitarian regimes require a leader whose will takes the place of law. If that alone is “true” and “good” which serves the interests of a given class or nationality (or race), then there has to be an arbiter in the person of a vozhd’, Duce, or Führer to decide what these interests at any given time happen to be. Although in practice Lenin always had his way (at any rate, after 1918), he made no claims of infallibility. Both Mussolini and Hitler did. “Il Duce a sempre ragione” (The Duce is always right) was a slogan posted all over Italy in the 1930s. The first commandment in the Rules of the Nazi Party issued in July 1932 declared “Hitler’s decision is final.”⁸¹ While a seasoned totalitarian regime may survive the death of its leader (as the Soviet Union did after the demise of both Lenin and Stalin), unless another leader takes over, it becomes a collective dictatorship that in time loses its totalitarian characteristics and turns into an oligarchy.

In Soviet Russia, the personal dictatorship of Lenin over his party was camouflaged by such formulas as “democratic centralism” and the custom of deemphasizing the role of individuals in favor of impersonal historic forces. It is nevertheless true that within a year after taking power, Lenin became the unchallenged boss of the Communist Party, around whom emerged a veritable personality cult. Lenin never tolerated a view that conflicted with his own, even if it happened to be that of the majority. By 1920 it was a violation of Party regulations, punishable by expulsion, to form “factions,” a “faction” being any group that acted in concert against first Lenin’s and then Stalin’s will: Lenin and Stalin alone were immune to the charge of “factionalism.”⁸²

Mussolini and Hitler emulated this Communist model. The Fascist Party had an elaborate facade of institutions designed to give the impression that it was run collectively: but none of them, not even the “Gran Consiglio” and the Party’s National Congresses, had effective authority.⁸³ Party officials, all of whom owed their appointments either to the Duce or to persons designated by him, swore an oath of loyalty to his person. Hitler did not even bother to camouflage his absolute control over the National Socialist Party. Long before he became dictator of Germany, he established complete domination over the Party, insisting, like Lenin, on strict discipline (that is, submission to his will) and, again like Lenin, rejecting coalitions with other political bodies since they would have diluted his authority.⁸⁴

2. The Ruling Party and the State

Like Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler used their organizations to take over the state. In all three countries, the ruling party functioned as a private organization. In Italy, the fiction was maintained that the Fascist Party was merely a “civilian and voluntary force under the command of the state,” although the truth was the opposite even if, for appearance’s sake, government officials (prefects) formally took precedence over Fascist functionaries.⁸⁵

The manner in which the Bolshevik, Fascist, and Nazi parties took charge of the administrations of their respective countries was, for all practical purposes, identical: once the Leninist principle had been assimilated, its implementation was a relatively straightforward matter. In each case the Party either absorbed or emasculated institutions that stood in the way of its aspiration to unlimited authority: in the first place, the nation’s executive and legislative bodies, in the second, the organs of local self-government. These state institutions were not made to obey Party instructions directly: elaborate expedients were used to give the impression that the state acted independently. The Party ran the administration by placing its members in key executive positions. The explanation for this deception was that the totalitarian “movement,” as its name implies, is dynamic and fluid, whereas administration, being static, requires solid structures and firm norms. The following observations about Nazi Germany apply equally to Communist Russia and Fascist Italy:

The movement itself makes the political decisions and leaves their mechanical implementation to the state. As phrased during the Third Reich, the movement assumed leadership of people (Menschenführung) and left to the state the management of objects (Sachverwaltung). In order as much as possible to avoid open breaks between political measures (which are not guided by any norms) and norms (which are unavoidable for technical reasons) the [Nazi] regime outwardly clothed its actions as nearly as possible in legal forms. This legality, however, had no decisive meaning; it served only to bridge the gap between two irreconcilable forms of rule.⁸⁶

The “conquest of institutions,” which one early student of Fascism regarded as “the most unusual conquest of the state known to modern history,”⁸⁷ was, of course, a mere copy of a similar process that had occurred in Soviet Russia after October 1917.

The Bolsheviks subjugated Russia’s central executive and legislative institutions in a matter of ten weeks.⁸⁸ Their task was facilitated by the disappearance of the tsarist regime with its bureaucracy in early 1917, which left a power vacuum that the Provisional Government had been unable to fill. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, Lenin confronted not a functioning state system but anarchy.

Mussolini proceeded at a much more leisurely pace: he became de facto and de jure dictator of Italy only in 1927–28, more than five years after capturing Rome. Hitler, by contrast, moved nearly at Lenin’s speed, gaining control of the state in six months.

On November 16, 1922, Mussolini advised the Chamber of Deputies “in the name of the nation” that he had assumed power: the Chamber had the choice of either approving this fact or facing dissolution. It approved. But Mussolini pretended for the time being to govern constitutionally and introduced the one-party regime with deliberation, by stages. In the first year and a half, he included representatives of some independent parties in the cabinet dominated by Fascists. He ended the pretense at coalition government only in 1924 after coming under strong attack for the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, a Socialist deputy who had exposed the Fascists’ illegal acts. Even so, he allowed rival political organizations to function a while longer. The Fascist Party was designated the sole legal political entity in December 1928, when the process of shaping the one-party state in Italy may be said to have been completed. Control over the provinces was secured by a device borrowed from the Bolsheviks of having local Fascist functionaries supervise the prefects and pass on to them the Duce’s directives.

In Nazi Germany, the establishment of Party domination over the government and private bodies went by the name of Gleichschaltung, or “Synchronization.”^* In March 1933, two months after being appointed Chancellor, Hitler extracted from the Reichstag an “Enabling Act,” by virtue of which the parliament divested itself of the power to legislate for a period of four years—in fact, as it turned out, permanently. From then until his death twelve years later, Hitler ruled Germany by means of “emergency laws,” issued without regard for the constitution. He promptly liquidated the powers enjoyed in both Imperial and Weimar Germany by the federal states, dissolving the administrations of Bavaria, Prussia, and the other historic entities, thus creating Germany’s first unitary state. In the spring and summer of 1933, he outlawed independent political parties. On July 14, 1933, the NSDAP was declared the only lawful political organization: at that time Hitler asserted, quite incorrectly, that “the party has now become the state.” In reality in Nazi Germany, as in Soviet Russia, the Party and the state remained distinct.⁸⁹

Neither Mussolini nor Hitler dared to make a clean sweep of laws, courts, and civil rights of their citizens, as Lenin had done: legal traditions were too deeply rooted in their countries for the introduction of legalized lawlessness. Instead, the two Western dictators were content to limit the competence of the judiciary and remove from its purview “crimes against the state,” which were turned over to the security police.

To deal with political opponents in an effective, extrajudiciary manner, the Fascists established two police organizations. One, known after 1926 as the Voluntary Enterprise for the Repression of Anti-Fascism (OVRA), differed from its Russian and German counterparts in that it functioned under the supervision not of the Party but of the state. In addition, the Fascist Party had its own secret police, which operated “Special Tribunals” to try political opponents and administered their places of confinement.⁹⁰ Despite Mussolini’s frequently expressed fondness for the idea of violence, his regime, compared to the Soviet and Nazi ones, was quite moderate and never resorted to mass terror: between 1926 and 1943, it executed a total of 26 persons,⁹¹ which was a fraction of the victims Lenin’s Cheka claimed in a single day, not to speak of the millions who perished under Stalin and Hitler.

The Nazis also emulated the Communists in setting up the security police. It is from them that they adopted the practice (which in Russia originated in the early nineteenth century) of creating two distinct police establishments, one to protect the government, the other to maintain public order. These came to be known, respectively, as the “Security Police” (Sicherheitspolizei) and “Order Police” (Ordnungspolizei), corresponding to the Soviet Cheka and its heirs (OGPU, NKVD, and so forth), and the Militia. The Security Police, or Gestapo, as well as the SS, which jointly protected the Party, were not subject to state control, serving directly under the Führer through his trusted associate Heinrich Himmler. This, too, followed the example set by Lenin in the case of the Cheka. Neither institution was restrained by judiciary institutions or procedures: like the Cheka and GPU, they could confine citizens to concentration camps, where they were deprived of all civil rights. Unlike their Russian counterparts, however, they did not have the authority to sentence German citizens to death.

These measures, which subordinated all public life to a private organization, the Party, produced a type of government that did not fit the standard categories of Western political thought. What Angelo Rossi says of Fascism could with equal if not greater measure be applied to Communism and National Socialism:

Wherever fascism is established the most important consequence, on which all the others depend, is the elimination of the people from all share of political activity. “Constitutional reform,” the suppression of parliament, and the totalitarian character of the regime cannot be judged by themselves, but only in relation to their aims and results. Fascism is not merely the substitution of one political regime for another; it is the disappearance of political life itself since this becomes a state function and monopoly.⁹²

On these grounds, Buchheim makes the interesting suggestion that it may be incorrect to speak of totalitarianism as endowing the state with excessive power. In fact, it is the negation of the state:

In view of the different natures of state and totalitarian rule, it is a contradiction in terms to speak of a “totalitarian state,” as is still quite generally done.… It is a dangerous error to see totalitarian rule as an excess of state power; in reality, the state as well as political life, properly understood, are among the most important prerequisites to protect us against totalitarian danger.⁹³

The “elimination of the people from all share of political activity” and, its corollary, the liquidation of political life demand some kind of surrogate. Dictatorships that pretend to speak for the people cannot simply revert to predemocratic authoritarian models. Totalitarian regimes are “demotic” in the sense that they claim to reflect the will of the people, widely acknowledged since the American and French revolutions as the true source of sovereignty, without giving the people any voice in political decisions. The surrogates are of two kinds: sham “elections,” in which the ruling party routinely wins nine-tenths or more of the votes; and grandiose spectacles that create the illusion of mass involvement.

The need for political drama was felt already by the Jacobins, who disguised their dictatorship with elaborate festivals, such as those honoring the “Supreme Being” and celebrating July 14th. By bringing together the all-powerful leaders and the powerless populace in secular rituals, the Jacobins sought to convey a sense of being one with their subjects. The Bolsheviks used their sparse resources during the Civil War to hold parades, address thousands of the faithful from balconies, and stage open-air theatrical performances based on recent events. The producers of such spectacles went to great lengths to obliterate barriers separating actors from spectators and, thus, the leaders from the masses. The masses were managed in accord with the principles laid down in the late nineteenth century by French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, who ascribed to crowds a distinct collective personality that made them a willing object of psychic manipulation.^* The Fascists first experimented with these methods during their occupation of Fiume in 1919–20, when the city was ruled by the poet-politician Gabriele d’Annunzio: “The succession of festivals in which d’Annunzio played a leading role were supposed to abolish the distance between the leader and the led, and the speeches from the balcony of the town hall to the crowd below (accompanied by trumpets) were to accomplish the same purpose.”⁹⁴ Mussolini and other modern dictators found such methods indispensable—not as entertainment but as rituals designed to convey to opponents and skeptics alike the impression of an unbreakable bond between rulers and ruled.

No one excelled the Nazis in these productions. Using the latest techniques of the cinema and stage, they mesmerized Germans by rallies and pagan rituals that conveyed to participants and onlookers alike the impression of an elemental force which nothing could stop. The identity of the Führer and his people was symbolized by hordes of uniformed men lined up like lead soldiers, the rhythmic screams of the crowds, the illuminations, the flames and flags. Only the most independent spirits could retain enough presence of mind to realize the purpose of these displays. To many Germans, such live spectacles reflected the spirit of the nation far better than the mechanical computation of ballots. The Russian socialist émigré Ekaterina Kuskova, who had the opportunity to observe both Bolshevik and “Fascist” practices of crowd manipulation, noted the similarities: “Lenin’s method,” she wrote in 1925,

is to convince through compulsion. The hypnotist, the demagogue subordinates the will of the object to his own will—herein lies compulsion. But the subject is convinced that he is acting out of his own free will. The tie between Lenin and the masses is literally of the same nature.… Exactly the same picture is provided by Italian Fascism.⁹⁵

The masses subjected to such methods in effect brutalized themselves.

In this connection something needs to be said about totalitarian ideology. Totalitarian regimes formulate and impose systems of ideas which purport to provide answers to all questions of private and public life. Secular ideologies of this kind, enforced by Party-controlled schools and media, are an historical innovation introduced by the Bolsheviks and emulated by the Fascists and Nazis. It is one of the principal legacies of the Bolshevik Revolution. Some contemporary observers, struck by its novelty, saw in it the most outstanding feature of totalitarianism and believed that it would transform people into robots.^*

Experience has shown such fears to be groundless. The uniformity of the publicly spoken and printed word on any subject that mattered to the authorities was indeed virtually complete under the three regimes: none of them, however, succeeded in controlling thought. The function of ideology was similar to that of the mass spectacles, that is, to create the impression of the individual’s total immersion in the community. The dictators themselves had no illusion and did not terribly much care that behind the facade of oneness their subjects thought their private thoughts. How seriously can one take Nazi “ideology,” given that Hitler, by his own admission, never bothered to read Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century, officially proclaimed to be the theoretical basis of National Socialism? And how many Russians were really expected to master the abstruse and irrelevant economics of Marx and Engels? In Mao Zedong’s China, indoctrination assumed the most extreme forms ever known, as one billion people lost access to education and to books other than collections of the tyrant’s own sayings. Yet the instant Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao passed from the scene, their teachings dissolved into thin air. Ideology, in the end, proved to be but another spectacle, equally ephemeral.^†

3. The Party and Society

For the people to become truly passive material in the hands of dictators it is not enough to deprive them of a voice in politics: it is necessary also to deprive them of their civil liberties—the protection of law, the rights of assembly and association, and guarantees of property. It is when a dictatorship ventures onto this path that it crosses the line separating “authoritarianism” from “totalitarianism.” Although the distinction was first popularized in the United States by Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1980, and from her entered the vocabulary of the Reagan Administration, for which reason it has been rejected by some as Cold War rhetoric, its antecedents go back to the early 1930s. In 1932, on the eve of the Nazi takeover, a German political scientist wrote a book titled Authoritarian or Totalitarian State?, in which he made clear the distinction.⁹⁶ In 1957, a German émigré scholar, Karl Loewenstein, thus distinguished the two systems:

The term “authoritarian” denotes a political organization in which the single power holder—an individual person or “dictator,” an assembly, a committee, a junta, or a party—monopolizes political power However, the term “authoritarian” refers rather to the structure of government than to the structure of society. As a rule, the authoritarian regime confines itself to political control of the state without aspiring to the complete domination of the socioeconomic life of the community.… By contrast, the term “totalitarian” refers to the socioeconomic dynamism, the way of life, of a state society. The governmental techniques of a totalitarian regime are necessarily authoritarian. But the regime does much more than exclude the power addressees from their legitimate share in the formation of the will of the state. It attempts to mold the private life, the soul, the spirit, and the mores of the citizens to a dominant ideology.… The officially proclaimed ideology penetrates into every nook and cranny of the state society; its ambition is “total.”^*

The distinction between the two types of antidemocratic regimes is fundamental for the understanding of twentieth-century politics. Only someone hopelessly ensnared by the phraseology of Marxism-Leninism could fail to see the difference between Nazi Germany and, say, Salazar’s Portugal or Pilsudski’s Poland. Unlike totalitarian regimes, which strive radically to alter existing society and even to remake man himself, authoritarian regimes are defensive and in this sense conservative. They emerge when democratic institutions, buffeted by irreconcilable political and social interests, can no longer function properly. They are essentially devices to facilitate political decision-making. In governing, they rely on traditional sources of support and, far from trying to engage in social “engineering,” attempt to preserve the status quo. In nearly every known case, whenever authoritarian dictators died or were ousted, their countries experienced little difficulty restoring democracy.^*

Judged by these criteria, only Bolshevik Russia at the height of Stalinism qualifies as a fully developed totalitarian state. For while Italy and Germany emulated Bolshevik measures intended to atomize society, even at their worst (Nazi Germany during the war) they fell short of what Lenin had intended and Stalin realized. Whereas the Bolshevik leaders relied almost exclusively on coercion, Mussolini and even Hitler followed Pareto’s advice to combine coercion with consent. They were willing to leave society and its institutions intact as long as their orders were unquestioningly obeyed. In this case, historical traditions were decisive. The Bolsheviks, operating in a society accustomed by centuries of absolutism to identify government with arbitrary authority, not only could but virtually had to take over and manage society, engaging in more repression than strictly necessary in order to demonstrate they were in charge. Neither the Fascists nor the Nazis destroyed their respective social structures, for which reason, after they had suffered defeat in World War II, their countries could rapidly return to normalcy. In the USSR, all attempts between 1985 and 1991 to reform the Leninist-Stalinist regime led nowhere because every nongovernmental institution, whether social or economic, had to be built from scratch. The result was neither reform of Communism nor establishment of democracy, but a progressive breakdown of organized life.

In Russia, the destruction of independent, nonpolitical institutions was facilitated by the fact that social institutions, underdeveloped to being with, all but disintegrated in the anarchy of 1917. In some cases (for example, trade unions, universities, and the Orthodox Church), the Bolsheviks replaced existing management with their own personnel; other institutions they simply dissolved. By the time of Lenin’s death, there remained in Russia virtually no institution that was not under direct Communist Party control. With the exception of the peasant commune, which was given a temporary lease on life, nothing stood between the individual citizen and the regime capable of interceding on his behalf.

In Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, private associations fared much better: in particular, the trade unions, although placed under party control, continued to enjoy a degree of autonomy and influence that, insignificant as it may seem to citizens of democratic societies, was entirely out of reach of workers in the Soviet Union.

In asserting his personal authority over Italian society, Mussolini proceeded with the same caution he displayed in regard to political institutions. His revolution progressed in two phases. From 1922 until 1927, he was a typical authoritarian dictator. His move toward totalitarianism began in 1927 with the assault on the independence of private associations. That year he required all such associations to submit to the government their statutes and membership lists. The measure served to bring them into line, since henceforth membership in organizations willing to defy the Fascist Party carried personal risk. The same year, Italian trade unions were deprived of their traditional rights and forbidden to strike. Even so, they retained some power because Mussolini used them as a counterweight to private enterprise: under Fascist legislation, business enterprises had to grant trade union representatives equal rights in decision-making under the overall guidance of the Party.

Hitler covered Germany with a network of Nazi-controlled associations embracing every professional and vocational group, including teachers, lawyers, physicians, and aviators.⁹⁷ Because of the strong Social Democratic influence, trade unions were dissolved (May 1933) and replaced with a “Labor Front,” which, following the example of Mussolini, included not only workers and clerical help but also employers, the three groups being expected to settle their differences under Nazi Party supervision.⁹⁸ Membership in the Front being compulsory, the organization grew by leaps and bounds, eventually enrolling one-half of the country’s population. Institutionally, the Labor Front was a branch of the National Socialist Party. In time, as in Stalin’s Russia, German workers were forbidden to quit their jobs and managers could not discharge them without permission of the authorities. Emulating the Bolsheviks, in June 1935 Hitler introduced obligatory labor service.⁹⁹ The consequence of these policies was, as in Soviet Russia, the assumption by the Party of complete control of the country’s organized life. “The organization of the community,” Hitler boasted in 1938, “is a thing gigantic and unique. There is hardly a German at the present time who is not personally anchored and active in one or another of the formations of the National Socialist community. It reaches into every house, every workshop and every factory, into every town and village.”¹⁰⁰

As in Lenin’s Russia, the Fascist and Nazi parties imposed governmental monopolies on information. In Russia all independent newspapers and periodicals were liquidated by August 1918. With the establishment in 1922 of the central censorship bureau, Glavlit, control of the printed word by the Communist Party became complete. Similar controls were established over the theater, cinema, and every other form of expression, including even the circus.^*

Mussolini began his assault on the independent press within a year after coming to power, sending thugs to storm the editorial offices and printing presses of unfriendly newspapers. After the murder of Matteotti, papers that spread “false” news were subject to heavy fines. Finally, in 1925, freedom of the press was officially abolished, and the government imposed uniformity of news coverage and editorial comment. Even so, ownership of publications remained in private hands, foreign publications were allowed in, and the church could circulate its own daily, Osservatore Romano, which by no means toed the Fascist line.

In Germany, press freedom was curtailed under emergency legislation within days of Hitler’s assuming the chancellorship. In January 1934, a Reich “Press Leader” was appointed to ensure that the press followed Party directives, with authority to dismiss uncooperative editors and journalists.

The Nazi conception of law was identical with the Bolshevik and the Fascist: law was not the embodiment of justice but an instrument of domination. The existence of transcendental ethical standards was denied; morality was depicted as subjective and determined by political criteria. Lenin told Angelica Balabanoff when she criticized him for slandering as “traitors” socialists whose only sin was disagreeing with him: “Everything that is done in the interest of the proletarian cause is honest.”¹⁰¹ The Nazis translated this pseudomorality into racial terms according to which that was moral which served the interests of the Aryan race.^* This convergence in the definition of ethics, one based on class, the other on race, resulted in similar conceptions of law and justice. Nazi theoreticians treated both in a utilitarian manner: “Law is that which benefits the people,” the “people” being identified with the person of the Führer, who in July 1934 appointed himself the country’s “Supreme Judge.”^† Although Hitler frequently spoke of the need eventually to abolish the entire judiciary system, for the time being he preferred to subvert it from within. To deal with “crimes against the people,” as they chose to define them, the Nazis copied the Bolsheviks and introduced two types of tribunals: “Special Courts” (Sondergerichte), the counterpart of Lenin’s Revolutionary Tribunals, and “People’s Courts” (Volksgerichthofe), analogues of identically named institutions in Soviet Russia. In the former, customary legal procedures were set aside in favor of summary verdicts dictated by the Party. Throughout the Nazi period, whenever a crime was declared to be of a political nature, the need for legal proof was dispensed with.¹⁰² “Healthy Volk perception” became the principal means of determining guilt or innocence.

On the face of it, a major difference between the practices of Communism on the one hand, and those of Fascism and National Socialism on the other, lay in their respective attitudes toward private property. It is this consideration that causes many historians to classify the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler as “bourgeois” and “capitalist.” But a closer look at the way these regimes treated private property reveals that they regarded ownership not as an inalienable right but as a conditional privilege.

In Soviet Russia, by the time of Lenin’s death all capital and all productive assets were state property. With the collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s, which deprived the peasantry of the right to dispose of its product, the abolition of private property was completed. In 1938, according to Soviet statistical sources, the state owned 99.3 percent of the country’s national income.¹⁰³

Mussolini set the pattern that Hitler followed. He felt that private property had a place in the Fascist state, without acknowledging it as a “natural,” and therefore inalienable, right: ownership of property was for him a qualified right, subordinate to the interests of the State, which had the authority to interfere with it, and, where the means of production were concerned, to abolish it by nationalization.¹⁰⁴ Fascist authorities incessantly meddled in private enterprises that did not live up to their expectations, whether because of poor management, bad labor relations, or some other cause. They had frequent altercations with industrialists, who resented having to treat trade unions as partners. They also intervened in the process of production and distribution, “adjusting” profits and replacing managers. Referring to these practices, one contemporary observed that it was inappropriate to regard Fascism as “triumphant capitalism,” since under it private enterprise was as much controlled as was labor.¹⁰⁵

The Nazis also saw no reason to abolish private enterprise, since it was cooperative and eager to help with the rearmament drive that Hitler designated his main economic objective. Tolerance of private business was an expedient, not a matter of conviction. Like the Fascists, the Nazis acknowledged the principle of private property but denied its sanctity on the grounds that productive wealth, like manpower, had to serve the needs of the “community.” In the words of one Nazi theorist, “Property was … no longer a private affair but a kind of State concession, limited by the condition that it be put to ‘correct’ use.”¹⁰⁶ Of course, “property” that is not a “private affair” is no longer private property. The Führer, as the personification of the national spirit, enjoyed the right to “limit or expropriate property at will where this limitation or expropriation was consonant with the ‘tasks of the community.’ ”¹⁰⁷ On July 14, 1933, the day the NSDAP was declared the only legal party, a law authorized the confiscation of all property “hostile” to the interests of the Party and State.¹⁰⁸ The Nazi Four Year plans, directly borrowed from Communist practices and intended for the same end, namely rapid rearmament, greatly enhanced the ability of the State to interfere with economic activity.

A generation of Marxist and neo-Marxist mythology notwithstanding, probably never in peacetime has an ostensibly capitalist economy been directed as non- and even anti-capitalistically as the German economy between 1933 and 1939…. The status of business in the Third Reich was at best the product of a social contract between unequal partners, in which submission was the condition for success.¹⁰⁹

The rights of farmers to dispose of their land was strictly regulated with a view to keeping it in the family.¹¹⁰ Interference with business was constant, even to the point of limiting the amount of profits that corporations could pay out in dividends. Rauschning warned Western appeasers in 1939 that the expropriation by the Nazis of Jewish wealth was only a first step, a prelude to “the total and irrevocable destruction of the economic position” of Germany’s capitalists and former ruling classes.¹¹¹

The attribution to Nazism of a “bourgeois” character has traditionally rested on two arguments, both refuted by historical evidence. It has been widely believed that in his march to power Hitler benefited from financial support from industrial and banking circles. Studies of the documentary evidence, however, indicate that big business gave Hitler only negligible sums, much smaller than those it passed to conservative parties opposed to him, because it was suspicious of his socialist slogans:

Only through gross distortion can big business be accorded a crucial, or even major, role in the downfall of the [Weimar] Republic.… If the role of big business in the disintegration of the Republic has been exaggerated, such is even more true of its role in the rise of Hitler.… The early growth of the NSDAP took place without any significant aid from the circles of large-scale enterprise.¹¹²

Secondly, it is not possible to show that at any time during the Nazi regime big business was able to resist the policies of the Nazis, let alone dictate policies to them. A German Marxist historian describes the place of the capitalist class under Hitler as follows: “In the self-perception of Fascism, the Fascist system of government is characterized by the primacy of politics. As long as the primacy of politics was safeguarded, it was a matter of indifference to the Fascists which groups profited from their regime. Since the economic order was, in the Fascist world outlook, of secondary importance, they also accepted the existing capitalist order.”^* The National Socialist movement, writes another scholar, “was from the beginning a government by a new and revolutionary elite which tolerated industrialists and aristocrats only so long as they were content with a status that gave them no real influence over the determination of politics.”¹¹³ And content they were with ample state orders and the profits they provided.

In this connection it should not be forgotten that Lenin had no qualms about taking money from Russian millionaires as well as from the German Imperial government.¹¹⁴ On coming to power he was quite willing to collaborate with Russian big business, initiating negotiations with capitalist cartels to have them work in partnership with the new regime. The plan came to naught because of the opposition of the Left Communists, eager to proceed to Communism.¹¹⁵ But the intention was there; and if in 1921, when Lenin launched the New Economic Policy, anything had survived of Russian large-scale capitalist industry and commerce, he almost certainly would have struck a deal with it.

If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural conditions in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptations of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies.

The outstanding difference between Communism on the one hand, and Fascism and National Socialism on the other, lies in their attitudes to nationalism: Communism is an international movement, whereas Fascism, in Mussolini’s words, was not for “export.” In a speech to the Chamber of Deputies in 1921, Mussolini addressed the Communists as follows: “Between us and the Communists there are no political affinities but there are intellectual ones. Like you, we consider necessary a centralized and unitary state which imposes iron discipline on all persons, with this difference, that you reach this conclusion by way of the concept of class, and we by way of the concept of nation.”¹¹⁶ Hitler’s future Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, similarly believed that the one thing separating Communists from the Nazis was the former’s internationalism.¹¹⁷

How fundamental was this difference? On closer investigation, it can be explained largely by the specific social and ethnic conditions of the three countries.

In Germany in 1933, 29 percent of the adult population worked on the land, 41 percent in industry and handicrafts, and 30 percent in the service sector.¹¹⁸ Here, as in Italy, the distribution of urban and rural population, of wage earners, self-employed, and employers, of those who owned property and those who did not, was far more balanced than in Russia, which in this respect resembled Asia more than Europe. Given the complexity of social structure and the importance of groups that belonged neither to the “proletariat” nor to the “bourgeoisie,” it would have been quite unrealistic in Western Europe to pit the one class against the other. Here, an aspiring dictator could not identify himself with a single class without seriously weakening his political base. The truth of this proposition was demonstrated by the repeated failure of the Communists to stir up social revolution in the West. In every case—Hungary, Germany, Italy—that part of the intelligentsia and working class they succeeded in inciting to rebellion was crushed by a coalition of the other social groups. After World War II, even in countries where they had the greatest following, Italy and France, the Communists could never break out of their isolation, because of their reliance on a single class.

In the West an aspiring dictator had to exploit national, rather than class, animosities. Mussolini and his Fascist theoreticians skillfully fused the two by claiming that in the case of Italy, the “class struggle” pitted not one class of citizens against another, but the entire “proletarian nation” against the “capitalist” world.¹¹⁹ Hitler designated “international Jewry” as not only the “racial” but also the class enemy of Germans. While focusing resentment on outsiders—Carl Schmitt’s “enemy”—he balanced the interests of the middle class, workers, and farmers, without overtly favoring any one of them. The nationalism of Mussolini and Hitler was a concession to the fact that the structure of their societies required resentment to be deflected outward, that the road to power lay through the cooperation of diverse classes against foreigners.^* On a number of occasions—notably in Germany and Hungary—the Communists, too, had no hesitation in appealing to chauvinist emotions.

In the East, the situation was very different. Russia in 1917 was overwhelmingly a country of one class, the peasantry. Russian industrial labor was relatively small and, for the most part, still rooted in the village. This socially fairly homogeneous population of “toilers,” which in the Great Russian provinces comprised 90 percent of the total, was distinguished from the remaining 10 percent not only socioeconomically but also culturally. It felt no sense of national identity with the largely Westernized landlords, officials, professional people, businessmen, and intelligentsia. To Russian peasants and workers, they could just as well have been foreigners. The class enemy in revolutionary Russia, the burzhui, was at least as much identified by his speech, manners, and appearance as by his economic status. The road to power in Russia lay, therefore, by way of civil war between the mass of peasants and workers and the Westernized elite.

But if Russia was less complex socially than Italy and Germany, she was considerably more complex in terms of ethnic composition. Italy and Germany were ethnically homogeneous; Russia was a multinational empire in which the dominant group accounted for less than one-half of the population. A politician who appealed openly to Russian nationalism risked alienating the non-Russian half, a fact realized by the tsarist government, which had avoided overt identification with Great Russian nationalism, relying instead on the ethnically neutral “imperial” idea. For this reason as well, Lenin had to take a different route from Mussolini and Hitler and promote an ideology devoid of ethnic coloration.

In sum, given Russia’s fairly homogeneous social structure and heterogeneous ethnic structure, an aspiring Russian dictator could be expected to appeal to class antagonisms, whereas in the West, where the situation was reversed, the appeal would be to nationalism.

This said, it must be noted that in time, class-based and “nation-based totalitarianisms tended to converge. Stalin from the outset of his political career discreetly encouraged Great Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism; during and after World War II, he did so openly, in brazen chauvinistic terms. Hitler, for his part, felt German nationalism to be too restricting. “I can attain my purpose only through world revolution,” he told Rauschning, and predicted that he would dissolve German nationalism in the broader concept of “Aryanism”:

The conception of the nation has become meaningless.… We have to get rid of this false conception and set in its place the conception of race.… The new order cannot be conceived in terms of the national boundaries of the peoples with an historic past, but in terms of race that transcend those boundaries.… I know perfectly well, just as well as all these tremendously clever intellectuals, that in the scientific sense there is no such thing as race. But you, as a farmer and cattle-breeder, cannot get your breeding successfully achieved without the conception of race. And I as a politician need a conception which enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely and new anti-historic order enforced and given an intellectual basis.… And for this purpose the conception of race serves me well.… France carried her great Revolution beyond her borders with the conception of the nation. With the conception of race, National Socialism will carry the revolution abroad and re-cast the world.… There will not be much left then of the clichés of nationalism, and precious little among us Germans. Instead there will be an understanding between the various language elements of the one good ruling race.¹²⁰

Communism and “Fascism” have different intellectual origins in that the one is rooted in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the other in the anti-Enlightenment culture of the Romantic era. In theory, Communism is rational and constructive, “Fascism” irrational and destructive, which is why Communism has always had far greater appeal to intellectuals. In practice, however, this distinction, too, becomes blurred. Here, indeed, “being” determines “consciousness,” in that totalitarian institutions subordinate ideology and reshape it at will. As we have noted, both movements treat ideas as infinitely flexible tools to be imposed on their subjects to enforce obedience and create the appearance of uniformity. In the end, the totalitarianism of the Leninist-Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes, however different their intellectual roots, proved equally nihilistic and equally destructive.

Most telling of all, perhaps, is the admiration that the totalitarian dictators felt for one another. We have mentioned Mussolini’s high regard for Lenin and the praise he lavished on Stalin for turning into a “secret Fascist.” Hitler admitted to intimates respect for Stalin’s “genius”: in the midst of World War II, as his troops were locked in savage combat with the Red Army, he mused about joining forces with him to attack and destroy the Western democracies. The one major obstacle to such collaboration, the presence of Jews in the Soviet government, seemed capable of resolution in light of the assurances that the Soviet leader had given Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, that as soon as he had adequate cadres of gentiles he would remove all Jews from leading positions.¹²¹ And, in turn, Mao Zedong, the most radical of Communists, admired Hitler and his methods. When reproached at the height of the Cultural Revolution for sacrificing the lives of so many of his comrades, he responded: “Look at World War II, at Hitler’s cruelty. The more cruelty, the more enthusiasm for revolution.”¹²²

At bottom, the totalitarian regimes of the left and right varieties were united not only by similar political philosophies and practices, but by the common psychology of their founders: its driving motive was hatred and its expression violence. Mussolini, the frankest of them, referred to violence as a “moral therapeutic” because it forced people to make clear commitments.¹²³ In this, and in their determination to raze the existing world in which they felt themselves outcasts, at all costs and by all means, lay their kinship.

^* In The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958), p. viii, she calls the Jewish question and anti-Semitism “the catalytic agent” first of the Nazi movement and then of World War II. The first four chapters of her book are devoted to this subject.

^* See, for instance, the treatment meted out to Renzo de Felice by the Italian intelligentsia for stressing the popular, non-“bourgeois” roots of Fascism: Michael Ledeen in George Mosse, ed., International Fascism (London and Beverly Hills, 1979), 125–40.

^* The dictator of Ghana in the 1950s and 1960s, Kwame Nkrumah, an ally of the Soviet Union, had engraved on his monument the following paraphrase of the Gospels: “Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto you.”

^* These criteria were established by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York and London, 1964), 9–10. Economic planning was first realized in Soviet Russia in 1927, but its groundwork had been laid under Lenin with the creation in late 1917 of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh). See RR, Chapter 15.

^† It is one of the abiding myths of anti-Fascist literature that Sorel exerted a profound influence on Mussolini. The evidence suggests that such influence was small and transient. See Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making (Boston and New York, 1938), 228, and Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich, 1963), 203. Mussolini’s cult of violence derived not from Sorel but from Marx. Sorel, incidentally, wrote a eulogy to Lenin in September 1919 (“Pour Lénine” in Réflexions sur la violence, 10th ed., Paris, 1946, 437–54), in which he said that he would be immensely proud if it were true, as rumored, that he, Sorel, had contributed to the intellectual development of a man who seemed to him “both the greatest theoretician of socialism after Marx, and a head of state whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great” (p. 442).

^* His move is usually explained by the desire to evade the draft. But as A. James Gregor has pointed out, this could not have been the cause since Mussolini returned to Italy in November 1904 and spent the next two years in military service: Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley, 1979), 37.

^† Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883–1920 (Turin, 1965), 35n, believes such meetings did occur. Mussolini, who never gave a clear answer to the question whether he had encountered Lenin (“[the Russian émigrés] continually changed their names”), once cryptically remarked: “Lenin knew me much better than I knew him.” At any rate, during this period he did read some of Lenin’s writings in translation: he said they had “captivated him.” Yvon de Begnac, Palazzo Venezia: Storia di un Regime (Rome [1950]), 360.

^* In Italian socialist circles the idea that class consciousness is the natural product of class status was refuted by various socialist theoreticians from 1900 onwards; among them, Antonio Labriola, A. O. Olivetti, and Sergio Panunzio. A. James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Politics (Princeton, 1974), 107.

^* Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York and London, 1939), 53. This theory explains why totalitarian regimes are so insistent on destroying or taking over not only rival political parties, but all organizations without exception. Atomization of society allows a minority to rule the majority far more effectively.

^* Cited in de Felice, Mussolini, 245–46. The possibility has been raised that the actual author of this article was Mussolini himself. In 1919, Mussolini spoke of Italy’s entry into the war as “the first episode of the revolution, its beginning. The revolution continued under the name of war for 40 months”; cited in A. Rossi, The Rise of Italian Fascism, 1918–1922 (London, 1938), II.

^* In G. R. Urban, ed., Euro-communism (London, 1978), 151. Settembrini raises the interesting question of “what Lenin would have done if the Tsar, like the Italian government in 1914, had remained neutral. Can one be sure that Lenin would not have become an ardent interventionist?”: in George L. Mosse, ed., International Fascism (London and Beverly Hills, Cal., 1979), 107.

^* XII S”ezd RKP (b): Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1968), 273–74. “Uchraspredy” were organs of the Secretariat of the Central Committee responsible for assigning party functionaries. The editors of the protocols of the Twelfth Party Congress dismissed Bukharin’s analogy as “ridiculous,” “baseless,” and “unscientific”: ibid., 865. See further Leonid Luks, Entstehung der kommunistischen Faschismustheorie (Stuttgart, 1984), 47.

^† Renzo de Felice has drawn a distinction between Fascism as a movement and Fascism as a regime, stressing that the former was and remained revolutionary: Michael Ledeen in Mosse, International Fascism, 126–27. The same, of course, may be said of Bolshevism, which soon after coming to power turned conservative in order to maintain itself in power.

^* The Protocols in Luch Sveta, I, Book 3 (May 1920), 238. It is almost certainly under this inspiration that the Soviet authorities tolerated, and by tolerating, gave credibility to, the thesis that Jews had helped Hitler organize the Holocaust in order to drive their reluctant brethren to Palestine: L. A. Korneev, Klassovaia sushchnost’ Sionizma (Kiev, 1982).

^* Empress Alexandra noted in her diary under the date April 7, 1918 (OS): “Nicholas read to us the protocols of the free masons” (Chicago Daily News, June 23, 1920, 2). The book was found among the effects of Alexandra in Ekaterinburg: N. Sokolov, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i (Paris, 1925), 281. As previously noted, it was also Kolchak’s favorite reading.

^* Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (New York, 1962), 44. A photograph of Hitler in a crowd listening to a Social Democratic speaker in the winter of 1919–20 is reproduced in Joachim Fest’s Hitler (New York, 1974), between pages 144 and 145.

^† In a speech delivered on February 24, 1941, Hitler bluntly stated that “basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same”: The Bulletin of International News (London), XVIII, No. 5 (March 8, 1941), 269.

^‡ The term was coined in a pejorative sense in 1919 by Radek. The best study of this interesting if marginal movement is Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf’s Linke Leute von Rechts (Stuttgart, 1960).

^* Schüddekopf, Linke Leute, 87. The idea that Communism really expressed Russian national interests originated with N. Ustrialov and other theoreticians of the so-called “Smena Vekh” movement in Russian emigration of the early 1920s. See above, p. 139.

^* Karl Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur, 2nd ed. (Cologne-Berlin, 1969), 256. David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution (New York and London, 1980), 28, 36, gives slightly different figures. Some Marxist historians dispose of this embarrassing fact by excluding workers who joined the Nazi Party or voted for it from the ranks of the working class, on the grounds that the status of a worker is determined not by occupation but by the “struggle against the ruling classes”: Timothy W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich (Opladen, 1977), 9.

^† Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), 236. In 1930 Hitler is said to have told his surprised associates that he had read and learned a great deal from Trotsky’s recently published My Life, which he called “brilliant”: Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer (New York, 1944), 308. Heiden provides, however, no source for this information.

^* The possibility of the idea of class war being reinterpreted in a racial sense was raised as early as 1924 by a Russian Jewish émigré, I. M. Bikerman, as a warning to his pro-Bolshevik compatriots: “Why could not a free Cossack of Petlura or a Volunteer of Denikin follow a doctrine that reduced all history not to the struggle of classes but to the struggle of races, and, rectifying the sins of history, exterminate the race in which it sees the source of evil? Looting, killing, raping, excesses can be committed as conveniently under the one flag as under the other.” Rossiia i Evrei, Sbornik I (Berlin, 1924), 59–60.

^* The term initially applied to the integration of Germany’s federal entities into the centralized national state, but eventually it acquired a broader meaning, defining the subordination of all previously independent organizations to the Nazi Party: Hans Buchheim, Totalitarian Rule (Middletown, Conn., 1968), 11.

^* La Psychologie des foules (Paris, 1895). See RR, 398. It is known that Mussolini as well as Hitler had read Le Bon’s book: A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism (New York, 1969), 112–13, and George Mosse in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1989), 14. Lenin is said to have always had it on his desk: Boris Bazhanov, Vospominaniia byvshego sekretaria Stahna (Paris and New York, 1983), 117.

^* Students of totalitarianism often stress the imposition of an ideology as a determining quality of such regimes. Ideology, however, has in these regimes a largely instrumental role, serving to manipulate the masses. (Speaking of Nazism, Rauschning wrote: “Program and official philosophy, allegiance and faith, are for the mass. Nothing commits the elite—no philosophy, no ethical standard. It has but one obligation, that of absolute loyalty to comrades, to fellow members of the initiated elite” [Revolution of Nihilism, 20].) The same may be said of Communist ideology, which in application proved itself infinitely flexible. In any event, democracies, too, have their ideologies: when the French revolutionaries in 1789 issued the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” conservative contemporaries such as Burke and du Pan thought this a dangerous experiment. Far from being “self-evident,” the notion of inalienable rights was innovative and revolutionary for its time. Only a traditional ancien régime does not require an ideology.

^† Intellectual historians like Hannah Arendt and Jacob Talmon trace the origin of totalitarianism to ideas. The totalitarian dictators, however, were not intellectuals eager to test ideas, but men craving power over fellow men. They exploited ideas to achieve their objectives: their criterion was that which worked. The impact of Bolshevism on them lay not in its programs, from which they borrowed what suited them, but in the fact that the Bolsheviks succeeded in establishing absolute authority using previously untried methods. These methods were just as adaptable to national revolutions as to the international one.

^* Political Power and the Governmental Process (Chicago, 1957), 55–56, 58. Loewenstein incorrectly claimed credit for having introduced the distinction in 1942 in a book on the pro-Fascist Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas (ibid., 392, note 3).

^* Examples are Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Greece following the removal of the military junta, Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey, and Pinochet’s Chile.

^* See below, Chapter 6.

^* Hitler defined justice as “a means of ruling.” “Conscience,” he said, “is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision.” Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, 201, 220.

^† Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur, 235, 394. For further discussion of the Nazi conception and practice of law, see Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York, 1969), 107–149. The notion that morality is whatever benefits one’s people is said to have been drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to state, “Everything that benefits the Jewish people is moral and holy.” Arendt, Origins, 358.

^* Axel Kuhn, Das faschistische Hersschaftssystem (Hamburg, 1973), 83. The author uses “Fascist” to mean Nazi. It has been noted that under the Weimar Republic the German business community “displayed … a surprising indifference to governmental forms”: Henry A. Turner in AHR, Vol. 75, No. 1 (1969), 57.

^* The more knowledgeable members of the Comintern realized this. At their June 1923 Plenum, Radek and Zinoviev insisted that to break out of their isolation, the German Communists had to link up with the nationalistically minded elements. This was to be justified on the grounds that the nationalist ideology of “oppressed” nations, of which Germany was one, bore a revolutionary character. “In Germany,” Radek said on this occasion, “the heavy stress on the nation is a revolutionary act.” Luks, Entstehung der kommunistischen Faschismustheorie, 62.