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

Soviet camp, not because he had done anything, but because he
had survived Dachau. Over the years I’ve evidently spoken to many
Poles about the war and whenever I used the word liberation, a big
smile came over them. ‘What happened to me at the liberation? I
was let out of Mauthausen and taken into a Soviet prison. Do you
think that is liberation? Well it wasn’t.
Q: What does this mean for the debate on the comparison of fascism,
the Nazi regime, and Stalinism, which is still continuing? Do
you mean there is a reasonable comparison to be made?
There is a big section in my history of Europe on this question. Taking
into account something like twenty factors I did identify some
very strong similarities as well as some important differences. In
terms of evil it’s like answering the question ‘is it worse to be gassed
or to be starved to death in Siberia?’ Both systems were inhuman
to a degree that is difficult to imagine. Savage and deliberate mass
killing took place on both sides. Some aspects of the Nazi genocide,
especially the Holocaust seem more intense, but the scale of
killing by Stalin was much greater. Stalin killed more communists
than Hitler did. He had the entire Polish communist party rounded
up in 1938. We westerners are used to thinking in terms of right
versus left. One of the similarities of Fascism and Communism was
that they were both peculiar mixtures of left wing features and right
wing features. Neither of them fit into the scheme of Left versus
Right.
Reviewing the history of the Left in Europe is revealing in that sense.
The first people Stalin destroyed were socialists. The worst thing to
be in a country occupied by Stalin was either to be a Marxist or a
social democrat. Not Leninists though. Leninism was a very sectarian
view of Marxism. Imagine socialism being Christianity and the
Mormons, a sect who claim to be branch of Christianity, takes over
the largest Christian country and then that little peculiar sect persecutes
all the other Christians for not being Mormons. This is what
happened. Leninism was a tiny faction, even within Marxism in Russia.
The Mensheviks were actually a majority. But the Leninists, the
Bolsheviks, managed to get control over the government and first
of all eliminated what they called their left wing opposition: the trade
unionists and the Mensheviks. And then of course they started
killing communists. So it was not left versus right.
49 Norman Davies