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so. Even in France in the 1930s, when fascism was the central political
issue, few people on the left outside the Communist Party had any
sympathy for Stalinism. The most determined resistance and the most sys–
tematic intellectual confrontation with totalitarianism came precisely
from the democratic left. Virtually all theoretical thinking about totali–
tarianism came from German and also Russian democratic emigres. The
former prominently figures in Furet's book, but not the latter. The fault
is not Furet's. The importance of Russian emigre thinking with regard
to the origins of the concept of "totalitarianism" has been generally ig–
nored so far, even though
Sovremennye Zapiski
(the main literary-political
journal published in Paris) offers much of interest, as do the journals of
the Mensheviks, the S. R., and the essays of G. Fedotov.
There is a tendency in Furet's book to equate Communism and fas–
cism. Having devoted years of my life to finding common origins and
features between these two movements and systems, I find myself in the
unaccustomed role of disagreeing with what seems to me a simplifica–
tion. It is fully understandable that a Soviet writer such as Vasily Gross–
man (1905-] 964) the author of
Life and Fate,
whom Furet quotes at
length, was struck by the common features between Stalinism and Hit–
lerism. Grossman was a writer of powerful novels, but he lived under a
totalitarian regime in which knowledge about the Nazi and fascist sys–
tems was systematically suppressed. When confronting Nazism, the shock
of recognition, in his case and that of some contemporaries, was almost
blinding. Furet is not a novelist, but he still argues that Mussolini and
Hitler were deeply influenced by Lenin and Stalin, and that as Waldemar
Gurian put it, Hitler achieved better than Stalin Lenin's totalitarian
promise and in Nazi Germany the most perfect Bolshevik state was es–
tablished.
Furet's star witness is Hermann Rauschning; his three most important
conceptualizers and interpreters Hannah Arendt, Ernst Nolte, and
Gurian. Rauschning figures even more prominently in Richard Pipes's re–
cent book,
Russia under the Bolshevik Regime,
in a similar capacity.
Rauschning was a German conservative from Poland who joined the
Nazi party and at one time was head of the (Nazi-dominated) Danzig
(Gdansk) local parliament. In 1936, when he discovered that Hitler was
not a conservative at heart, he defected and emigrated. Rauschning's
book,
The Nazi Revolution of Nihilism
(1938) made him known, and his
next book,
Conversations with Hitler
(1939) became an international best–
seller. It consists of alleged Hitler quotations such as "National Socialism
is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and
artificial ties with a democratic order," and "I have learned a great deal
