Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

espectively, explore the “common historical ground” in the evolution
of the two dictatorships. Instead of unilaterally looking for sameness,
they accounted for striking communalities as well as “crucial
differences” in the totalitarian aspects of the two societies. On the
basis of a set of historically-informed essays focusing on the cult of
the leader, war machines, and the afterlife of these regimes in the
historical memory in Germany and Soviet Union, Kershaw and
Lewin concluded that “the Nazi and Stalin regimes are essentially
different despite their superficial similarities.” Their conclusion
refutes the main claim of the unitotalitarian approach that fascism
and communism are “basically alike.” 21 The two authors contend,
nevertheless, that the comparison between Nazi Germany and
Stalinist Russia is heuristically useful because only the comparative
approach is able to reveal “the historical uniqueness” of these
regimes. 22
Common Historical Origins: Historical-Genetic
Theories of Fascism and Communism
Historical-genetic theories of totalitarianism underscore both the
common intellectual origins of fascist and communist ideologies
and the multiple interactions between these two ideologies, the
movements and regimes they inspired. The proponents of this approach
argue that fascism and communism have a “common date
of birth,” which is traced back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment,
to the cataclysm of the French revolution and its aftermath
(1789-1815), to the Romantic age in the first half of the nineteenth
century, or to the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the intellectual
ferment of the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth
centuries.
A first genealogical view on the common origins of fascism and
communism focuses on their relation to the intellectual matrix of the
Enlightenment. Were fascist and communist ideologies a byproduct
of the Enlightened thought? If so, what is their relation to
modernity? Some scholars argue that both fascism and
21 Friedrich, Brzezinski, Totalitarian dictatorship, 2 nd ed. 19.
22 Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, “Introduction: The Regimes and their Dictators:
Perspectives of Comparison” in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds.
Nazism and Stalinism. Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 1-25.
137 Constantin Iordachi