Richard Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, And Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (Book Review)

Richard Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. xvi + 697 pp. New York: Knopf, 2007; paper, New York: Vintage, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-1400040056, $35.00 (cloth); 978-1400032136, $18.95 (paper). For the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, Bolshevism and fascism represented two incarnations of the disastrous presence of the devil in history: "The devil ... invented ideological states, that is to say, states whose legitimacy is grounded in the fact that their owners are owners of truth. If you oppose such a state or its system, you are an enemy of truth." (1) Both movements pretended to purify humanity of any agents of decadence and dissolution. For the Communists, the enemy was represented by private property, the bourgeoisie, the priests, the kulaks. The Nazis identified the Jewish "vermin," "Judeo-Bolshevism," "Judeo-plutocracy," and Marxism as the sources of all calamities. Fascism (and its radical version, Nazism) was adamantly anti-communist. In the 1930s, Stalinism made anti-fascism a pillar of its propaganda, seducing intellectuals and galvanizing resistance movements worldwide. Both party-movements execrated and denounced liberalism, democracy, and parliamentarianism as degradations of true politics, which would transcend any divisions through the establishment of perfect communities (classless or racially unified). Fundamentally atheistic, both communism and fascism organized their political objectives in discourses of alleged emancipation, political religions meant to deliver the individual from the impositions of traditional morality and legality.