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

Q: When discussing the Second World War, in the West we
mainly look at the Nazi past and Germany’s role whereas, as you
rightly note, in Eastern Europe there are two consecutive histories
to deal with. But the question remains how singular was the Holocaust?
Because even though the Russians killed more people than
Hitler did, in debates in Western Europe – and not least in Germany
– on the Holocaust and Holocaust denial we maintain that
the Nazi crimes stand out. They are incomparable. György Konrád
said to us, ‘the Nazis tried to kill a complete race; at least Stalin did
not murder children.’ Being a Jewish kid at the time of the Second
World War and actually having his life saved by the Russians there
is of course a lot of personal history in his perspective.
This is a very big problem, because there is obviously a huge political
campaign connected with the Holocaust. This extends to Israel
and present day politics. Jewish advocates in particular cannot
imagine there was anything comparable to the Holocaust. In my
view the crimes committed by Nazism and Stalinism were not identical,
but they were certainly comparable. A reasoned comparison
can be made: both Hitler and Stalin killed millions of people because
they were in a category regarded as hostile, not for anything
they had done. Nazi ideology laid categories on people by a
pseudo-racial system. Jews were classified as a race but so were
Roma and Slavs, who in fact are not a race but a linguistic group.
These people were killed – men, women, and children – simply because
they were in these categories. Stalin did exactly the same. He
eliminated millions of people – men, women, and children – because
they belonged to the wrong class. Soviet ideology developed
from Lenin, and while he was hardly a nice man, it was Stalin
who further developed this ideology of which killing people in huge
numbers was just part of the practice. Holodomor, the Ukrainian
terror famine in which probably more people died than in the Holocaust,
was an act of killing people by category. The Bolsheviks
formed a cordon around Ukraine – quite an achievement in itself
since it is no small country – preventing all regular export of food,
which they then confiscated. The Bolsheviks sent in people to take
away all food from farms and barns in Ukraine. The result was that
20 million people died. It was an absolutely deliberate act of policy.
This came on top of the campaign against the Kulaks during the
collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which an estimated
17 million peasants died. Again this is more than the Holocaust.
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