PAUL HOLLANDER
Revisi ting "The Banality of Evil":
Political Violence in Communist
Systems
The
demise of Soviet Communism has opened up new possibilities for
increasing our understanding of political violence in this century. We are
now in a far better position to compare and in doing so narrow the gap
between what we know about the two most murderous political systems
in this century: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, especially under
Stalin. Western and especially American levels of information and moral
awareness of the political violence perpetrated by Nazi Germany are far
greater than those of comparable activities of the Soviet Union and other
Communist states. Correspondingly far more is known about the Nazi
planners, organizers and executors of political violence and coercion than
of their Communist counterparts. There are numerous studies of the
major figures of Nazi political violence such as Adolf Eichman, Joseph
Goebbels, Heinrich HimmJer and Rudolf Hess (the latter the commander
of Auschwi tz), of the eli te troops and personnel assigned to these tasks (the
SS and Gestapo), of the defendants of the Nuremberg Trials which estab–
lished new standards for war crimes and politically motivated mass
murders. Specific theories and concepts have been devised to conceptual–
ize and understand Nazi murderousness and repression, such as " the
banality of evil," "desk murderers," "authoritarian personality," and "obe–
dience to authority." By any measure, corresponding information about
the specialists in coercion and organizers of mass violence in Communist
systems has been far more limited.
Even more striking is that some Western visi tors to Communist soci–
eties formed favorable impressions of their leading specialists in coercion
and political violence, and of their penal institutions (based usually on
conducted tours of model prisons) just as grotesquely misperceiving them
as they did the political system as a whole. Romain Rolland refered to
Genrikh Yagoda, who was in charge of Soviet repressions in the 1930s as
"fine-featured, distinguished.... [and] ... impregnated with sweetness."
Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore on a conducted tour of Soviet con–
centration camps in Kolyma were most favorably impressed by camp
