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PARTISAN REVIEW
The Gestapo and OVRA owe nothing to GPU inspiration or methods.
Information about the Russian labor camps on a large scale was received
in Germany well after the Nazi concentration camps were established.
Goebbels was impressed by Eisenstein's film
Battleship Potemkin,
but there
was never a Nazi film along similar lines. German academic research on
the Soviet Union was well ahead of the rest of the world before 1933;
when the Nazis came to power they closed down much of it and dis–
missed leading specialists - they simply had no interest in the subject. The
picture drawn of Nazi fear-and-trembling before Soviet bestialities and
Communist fanaticism is grossly exaggerated. The Nazis thought they
would defeat the Soviet Union as easily as the German Communist party
in 1933. Hitler and Goebbels did use the "Bolshevik danger" to frighten
the German capitalists, and they regarded the Soviet Union as their en–
emy, but this is not exactly a sensational revelation .
Bolshevism was not "better" than fascism, but in certain important
respects it was different. In the Soviet Union, as in Nazi Germany and
fascist Italy, terror and propaganda played a central role . There were
many more-than skin-deep similarities among the three. Each had a mo–
nopolistic state party, and all three, to different degrees, belonged to the
modern, totalitarian species of tyranny. The differences among them were
conditioned by history, ideology, and social and cultural traditions.
Furet is absolutely right in pointing to the common features of the to–
talitarian regimes, and those who dismissed them (and still continue to
do so) were and are mistaken. Is it not pedantic to quibble about the
extent and limits of the commonalities? The discussion has been going
on for sixty years and may go at least for another sixty. If we could take
for granted that fascism and Communism are things of the past, it would
matter little. But neither are quite dead, and they may reappear in un–
familiar guises. Rauschning remarks that Hitler told him in 1934 that
while Nazism would never become Communist, the Bolsheviks would
gradually turn National Socialist. Whatever the origin of this comment,
it was a remarkably astute observation. As we approach the end of the
century, a convergence of fascism and Communism seems quite probable.
What was (erroneously) stated in the past about "Red" and "Brown"
Bolshevism or fascism may paradoxically come true in the future.
There is reason to assume that we shall be spared a second coming of
Stalinism and Hitlerism. But the impulses which gave rise to fascism and
Communism have by no means disappeared, and the so-called "objective
conditions" are auspicious for the rise of a new synthesis of populism and
nationalism. The weaknesses of Western societies are known and need
not be reiterated in detail - the lack of cohesion in society, the social
