Conclusionary Reflection: From the European Civil War 1917-1945 to the World Civil War 1947-1990

The Epochs of the 20th Century

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Conclusionary Reflection: From the European Civil War 1917-1945 to the World Civil War 1947-1990

The Epochs of the 20th Century

The last battles of the European Civil War were fought in April and May 1945, but no one saw them as anything other than the desperate resistance of the defeated Wehrmacht, whose only goal was to bring as large a part of the population as possible of East Germany to the relative safety of the “West” before the invading armies of the Soviet Union. The “democratic world coalition” celebrated its victory when Field Marshal Keitel and Admiral von Friedeburg signed the surrender document on May 8 and all of Germany was occupied by the troops of the victorious powers. “Fascism” was frequently mentioned as the defeated power, but party affiliations hardly mattered anymore: the population of the German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers was expelled as such and as a whole, and no distinction was made between “Nazis” and “non-Nazis”; the same applied with slight modifications to the Sudeten regions. The leaders of the Third Reich—to the extent that they were caught—were for the most part sentenced to death and executed at Nuremberg as war criminals and for “crimes against humanity,” the SS was declared a “criminal organization,” and the NSDAP had already been dissolved; it was taken for granted that National Socialism had lost its power with the complete collapse of Germany and that only its “remnants” remained to be eliminated.

But already in the autumn of 1945, Vacheslav Molotov spoke of the necessity of eradicating the “roots of fascism,” and this turn of phrase made it unmistakably obvious to the connoisseurs of Soviet Marxist ideology that there was by no means—as Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to think before his death—just the “family” of victors, a democratic power of the East and the two democratic powers of the West, to be distinguished, but that only now, after the interlude of the unexpected phenomenon of fascism, the two world-historical forces, whose final struggle on the Rhine Lenin and Radek had predicted in 1919 as the immediate future, namely “Socialism” on the one hand and “Capitalism” on the other, faced each other directly,. How had the Soviet system ever see itself as anything other than anti-capitalist, and what so abhorrent to the Americans as the state planned economy, which turned the entrepreneur into a functionary and prevented the free play of market forces?

But the legacy of the Fascist epoch prevented the immediate revival of the traditional opposition, because the Soviet Union had been calling itself as “anti-fascist” in its most important proclamations since 1935, and the Labor Party in England, which came into power in the summer of 1945, and the coalition of parties that governed France under the leadership of General de Gaulle were also anti-fascist. Stalin, in turn, must have had a great interest in continuing to receive material aid from the United States for the Soviet Union, which had been badly smashed, but, however, was overwhelmingly strong in terms of conventional forces. Certainly, an anti-fascist world order of the Eastern and Western democracies would also have included considerable differences in power, and a good part of the friction of the post-war period can be understood from the conflicting powers in the struggle for relative power vacuums: Poland’s internal structure and foreign policy orientation, the peace agreement with Italy and Germany’s other allies, about the status of West Berlin—even the Berlin blockade can be partly explained from this, because even if the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church had ruled in the Kremlin and if a Quaker had been president in Washington, there still would have been many disputes about the American enclave in the middle of the Russian occupation territory.

But very soon after May 1945, dissonances in the anti-fascist harmony had also appeared on the Western side—initially in a rudimentary and half-hidden manner—which resulted from a deeper cause than the mere difference of power interests. As early as the summer of 1945 there were statements and reactions from Anglo-Saxon generals and diplomats that revealed a deep alienation, even hostility, towards the Soviet war ally and there were who even called for a concentration of all forces, including the Germans in the Western zones, for the purpose of self-assertion against the “barbaric” and ideologically hostile Soviet Union. On the other hand, the communist movement outside the Soviet Union did not always follow Stalin’s advice, despite Stalin’s immense prestige: Tito’s partisans behaved much more radically than Stalin thought desirable, and the Greek communists initiated a civil war. But even where Stalin’s will reigned supreme, developments took place that received a great deal of negative attention in the West, not least the “forced union” of the Social Democratic Party with the Communist Party in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, which was a characteristic example of the communist seizures of power and was imitated a little later in Czechoslovakia and in the other countries of East Central Europe. Churchill made explicit reference to them in his Fulton speech of March 5, 1946, the same Churchill, who in 1919 as British Secretary of War had been one of the most outspoken of all anti-Communists, and who, although no longer Prime Minister of Great Britain, was still a very influential man. And among the audience was Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt’s successor as President of the United States. Stalin reacted sharply, but already in a February 18 speech he had made announcements that could be understood to mean that the Soviet Union was now entering the second phase of confrontation with the secular enemy.

The proclamation of the “Truman Doctrine” by the American President in March 1947 marked the transition to an ideological world conflict, although the immediate cause was only the material support of the anti-communist government in Greece: two ways of life were in a comprehensive conflict all over the world —one based on the will of the majority and characterized by a representative system, free elections, guarantees of individual freedom and the absence of political oppression; the other way of life was based on the terror of a minority, unfree elections and the suppression of personal freedoms. In doing so, the President relied less on the theory of totalitarianism, which had not yet been fully developed, than the experience of totalitarianism that numerous refugees from the Soviet sphere of influence were already able to report on. If Lenin had confronted the world systems of capitalism and socialism, and if Hitler had contrasted his National Socialism as a principle of racial health embodied by Germany with the destructive principles of bolshevik and capitalist universalism, then for Truman the global conflict was now taking place between the freedom of the Western constitutional state and the terrorist oppression of communist totalitarianism.

The new conflict had thus also found the ideological articulation from the American side, without which it would have remained a mere power struggle between large states. The long history of this “Cold War,” which was often trivialized as the “East-West Conflict,” cannot be sketched here even in the briefest outline; only a few observations will be made, which compare this Cold War, which was in truth a world civil war with many changes, reversals, escalations and relaxations, with the European civil war from 1917-1945.

The challenge, the proclamation of something new, came from the idea of socialism and the revolutionary realization of this idea from 1947, indeed to a certain extent from 1945 as well as from 1917. But the idea had been considerably weakened, not least by the memory of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and former supporters had become opponents in no small numbers. On the other hand, the power base was no longer just Soviet Russia, and outside of it, a strong communist movement strong in Germany alone, but additionally all Eastern Europe occupied by Soviet troops, including the eastern part of Germany, and furthermore the powerful communist parties of France and Italy; in 1948/49 it was also became evident in China that communism was an autonomous force, and Mao Tse-tung’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek in the civil war created a power structure of overwhelming size, which in the West was soon called the “Soviet-Chinese bloc.” Although cracks appeared early on, such as with Tito’s defection in 1948, on the other hand, communist or socialist parties that sympathized with this bloc gained strength in many parts of the world. The feeling of being threatened was genuine on the part of the “West” and all supporters of economic and intellectual freedom.

In the years 1919 and 1920 Soviet Russia had invaded Hungary, Bavaria and Poland with the help of local communists and then also partly of soldiers. Everywhere these advances had been swiftly suppressed or repulsed, and the Soviet Union had devoted itself to “building socialism in one country,” though Stalin continued to be called the “leader of the world proletariat.” In the summer of 1950, however, communist North Korean troops had conquered most of the south of the peninsula, and when the American counterattack appeared to be successful, Chinese “volunteers” intervened. In the end, the status quo ante was restored, but communist forces prevailed against the French in Vietnam, and there, too, temporary stabilization was achieved only with great effort and difficulty. The attacking force thus withdrew much less into itself than it had been the case after 1918, and the theater of its activities was now worldwide. Objectively, the West was on the defensive, even though the greater part of Germany and all of Japan were within its sphere of influence.

In the period after World War I, the sense of threat and also the news of the “Red Terror” in Russia had contributed significantly to the rise to power of a new type of party in Italy and then in Germany, which were more intensely hostile to communism than the parties that had existed up to that point and which nevertheless bore striking similarities to the enemy, both as movements and as regimes. Nothing of the sort took place in the countries of the West after 1945: American McCarthyism remained a long way from developing into a party and even from seizing power—certainly also because the established parties developed a determined will to assert themselves and to defend themselves, not least the Berlin Social Democracy under the leadership of Ernst Reuter, who had been General Secretary of the German Communist Party in 1921. However, the most important means of struggle and self-assertion was not political will, but an extremely efficient economy, which broke all previous production records in the USA and brought about the “social market economy” in Germany. Thus, the very concretely experienced sense of distress, even among the initially extremely cautious allies of America in Berlin, was soon mixed with a feeling of superiority, which looked down on the meagre living conditions “in the East” and no longer knew anything about that “world economic crisis,” which in 1932 had made the difference that existed at that time almost invisible.

The early Soviet Union had not been entirely free from shocks to its confident self-esteem, for the struggle against Trotsky and Trotskyism was bound to raise critical questions about the October Revolution even among its supporters; but Stalin managed to overcome the crisis. Far more shattering after 1945 was the overthrow of the godlike “leader of all working people” Stalin, which began timidly soon after his death in 1953 and reached a stupendous climax in Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th party congress in 1956, confirming almost every criticism that had ever been leveled in the West at the Soviet system. However, Khrushchev and the CPSU managed to steer intra-Soviet criticism away from the system and toward the “cult of personality,” and there is no doubt that Khrushchev remained as enthusiastic a Marxist and convinced of the ultimate universal victory of communism as any of his predecessors.

In 1940 almost the whole of Europe had been divided into a Soviet-communist and a German-National Socialist sphere of power; in 1960, a one third of the world was communist and about one third “capitalist,” while the rest consisted of those “underdeveloped” areas that had already completed the process of “decolonization,” such as India, or were still in the process, such as Algeria and the Congo. In 1940 Stalin and Hitler had pursued a kind of pacification policy which, under the conditions of the undecided war between Germany and England, would very likely have led to war even if Hitler had not been a militant anti-communist and a radical spatial politician; in 1959-1962, during the Berlin and Cuban crises, nuclear war between the “superpowers” seemed to be on the verge of breaking out, but since this war—unlike that of 1941—objectively posed a threat to the physical existence of mankind according to widespread opinion, Khrushchev and Kennedy shrank back from such a dangerous and momentous decision. For almost 30 years the coexistence of the hostile systems stabilized, and what had been a fleeting impression between 1939 and 1941 now became the postulate and conviction of powerful currents of public opinion in the West and the official pronouncements in the East: the “peaceful coexistence,” indeed (according to the liberal opinion in the West) the “convergence” of the hitherto hostile halves of the world.

In 1941 the Soviet Union was under a single will, that of Stalin, just as Germany was under the will of Hitler. In 1963 the Soviet-Chinese conflict had become apparent, while in the West, French President de Gaulle was able to distance himself from the leading power USA far more decisively than Mussolini had been able to do against Hitler in 1940. It is true that the Soviet Union achieved great successes under Brezhnev: it was recognized as an equal nuclear power by the Americans, who were facing a heavy defeat in Vietnam, its extraordinarily enlarged fleet made itself felt on all seas, and in the Helsinki Agreement of 1975 it seemed to have won the definitive fixing of the borders of its sphere of influence. But in return it had had to make important concessions to the Western concept of “human rights”; those “dissidents” who had endangered Soviet rule in Poland and Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were also becoming making themselves felt within the country, and above all, the convictions that had guided Stalin and countless other communists as late as 1941 had also become implausible in their own country: that “the bourgeoisie” was a dying class, that “capitalism” was a stagnant and rotting system, that an armed uprising of the impoverished workers was to be expected, and that there was no doubt about the “victors of history.” Although there were still quite a few voices in the West at the beginning of the 1980s that were very pessimistic about the future of the Western powers and considered a definitive defeat to be probable, they did not fear the impetus and enthusiasm of a hostile ideology, but the concentration of the will on the part of the other world powers, and unlike Hitler they did not look with bitterness and hatred at the enemy’s supporters in their own country who were determined to fight, but only with alarm at the many well-meaning and concerned people who were gathering in the “peace movement” and seemed ready to surrender to the Eastern powers and their medium-range missiles.

Thus, at the end of the 1980s, it was not militant anti-communism that sought war, as in 1941, but rather an extremely diverse entity, “the West,” which was geared primarily to the economic well-being of individuals and made “détente” its primary goal. The West sought rapprochement with a system that was still very different, still very powerful militarily, albeit weakened by the engagement in Afghanistan and still formally unyielding in its ideology. If this West or this “capitalist system” could still be called anti-communist at all, then it was a matter of “soft” anti-communism, which was very different from the “hard” anti-communism that had characterized the European civil war. This soft anti-Communism, it seemed, won the great victory of 1989/90, which included the reunification of Germany and the overthrow of the communist regimes in the states of non-Russian Eastern Europe. But the victory would hardly have come about if there had not been a remnant of toughness—principally Ronald Reagan’s decision to launch the “Strategic Defense Initiative” despite its exorbitant cost, and also the German government’s fundamental adherence to the concept of a “duty of care for all Germans” and the reunification of the country, which was so much questioned by many intellectuals.

It is very likely that this remnant of toughness and firmness of principle within a system that no longer “liberal” but “libertarian” in tendency had a causal, albeit by no means solely determining nexus with those developments on the other side that have become generally known since Mikhail Gorbachev took over the Soviet leadership in 1985 under the names “glasnost” and “perestroika.” This time the unavoidable task was to take up anew and deepen what Khrushchev had initiated and what his successors had then suppressed again, namely the criticism of a “cult of personality” that in the long run could not be kept separate from the question of the “system” that had made it possible. It was a task for which there was no precedent in world history, as it was not a completely defeated state like Germany after 1945, but one of the victorious powers of the Second World War, which had held its own against the USA in the subsequent “Cold War,” the world civil war, after all for decades—and not always only defensively. However, its socialist system had failed to deliver on big promises, such as Khrushchev’s promise to surpass the USA in per capita production within ten years, and for some time the “Golden West,” which had been unmistakably present in its own country in the form of currency stores, had been an ideal and a dream for its countless residents. For western Germans, on the other hand, after 1945 there was an almost absolute necessity to take a highly critical view of the German past and specifically of National Socialism; integration into the West was not, like Jürgen Habermas thought, a “great intellectual achievement” of his generation, but rather it was a process that had been absolutely imperative politically and intellectually, especially since it could also be linked to German traditions, a process, moreover, that brought with it all the greater advantages the more clearly and decisively it was carried out without much “effort of the concept”. In the Soviet Union, however, triumphalism had been natural, even compulsive, and self-criticism, if it took place, must represent a much greater achievement than in Germany. A look at some of the books in which this pre-1990 self-criticism appeared is therefore warranted. I have chosen a novel that, at the time of its publication in 1988, was considered representative of glasnost and perestroika, a historical account that could only be published abroad in 1980, and a novel whose author died in 1964 and which was only made known to the Soviet public in a preprint in 1990.

Anatoly Rybakov’s novel “The Children of the Arbat” would largely fit into the literature of encouragement and glorification that dominated the field in the 1950s and 1960s. In the summer of 1934, almost all students from Moscow’s Arbat district, which had once been a bourgeois and genteel residential area, are convinced that the rousing pathos of reconstruction that permeated their entire lives opened the way to a great future, and that their country as the “shock brigade of the world proletariat” and “bulwark of the future world revolution,” was thus correctly preparing for its world-redeeming task. Nevertheless, the prevailing atmosphere is again perceived as pressure, the atmosphere of unrelenting effort, incessant struggle for the predetermined goals and against the many vermin and saboteurs, to whom such threats as “Expose! Punish mercilessly! Destroy! Eradicate! Sweep off the face of the earth!” are applied. A young student who is very loyal to the party line is expelled from the university and then arrested because his harmless wall-newspaper has given offense to the party leadership. But this incident is part of a larger game that ties the student’s uncle, the head of a gigantic and newly built industrial plant beyond the Urals, even more closely to the man at the center of all these events—Stalin. Rybakov paints a very unfavorable picture of him: suspicious, power-hungry, vain, vindictive, brutal, skillfully playing off his subordinates against each other, he has risen to become the sole ruler of the huge country, and he now directs all his jealousy towards Sergei M. Kirov, the party secretary of Leningrad, who is so much more open and popular than he is. He sets his Chekists in motion against him, who, under Yagoda and Yezhov, have drawn a comprehensive control network over the entire population, in which everyone becomes a potential defendant, because the questionnaires that have to be filled out for all applications and requests relate to such a wide range of past activities, but also of relatives and friends, that everyone has to entangle themselves in contradictions or give insufficient information and is therefore helplessly at the mercy of the examining judge if even the slightest suspicion falls on him. No one can escape this power, which has its headquarters in the Lubyanka and is directed exclusively by Stalin’s will. Kirov also falls victim to it, by clearing the way for a disappointed man’s revolver. Hitler is mentioned only once in the book, namely in connection with the reports of the murder of Röhm and high SA leaders. The former opposition members Zinoviev and Radek, who have long since given way and are yet to become Stalin’s victims, want to see this as the beginning of the “death throes of the Nazi regime,” but Stalin declares them to be fools because June 30, 1934 was a strengthening Hitler, and he expects a corresponding strengthening of his own position when, six months later, he has Kirov eliminated and sets out on the path to the bloody “Great Purge” of 1936-1938. Nevertheless, the author Rybakov does not place himself on a moral judgment seat, but leaves open the possibility that Stalin is right about his rivals because by collectivizing agriculture—albeit with enormous sacrifices—he has broken the peasants’ individualistic property instincts and, above all, fulfilled the the conviction of the people that only fear of an all-powerful ruler would secure the necessary order, while freedom would lead to general slaughter.

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko’s “Stalin. Portrait of a Tyranny” is not a historical study but a pamphlet against Stalin, but it was written by an author who, through his family connections, had a great deal of inside knowledge of the Bolshevik ruling class. His father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, had been one of the key participants in the revolution as the “stormer of the Winter Palace” and as a member of the “Revolutionary War Committee” led by Trotsky, and he had served the Soviet state in high positions, most recently in Spain, until the Great Purge, to which he fell victim. His son had to spend many years in prisons and camps; partly because he refused to call his father an “enemy of the people.” For him, Stalin is nothing more than a common criminal who passed off his early bank robberies as service to the party and who distinguished from his peers only in a particularly high degree of cunning, ruthlessness and hunger for power. “A professional criminal mingled with the professional revolutionaries,” writes Antonov-Ovseyenko. He, too, tells a lot about Kirov’s murder, and the details could hardly be more repellent, because after the crime not only everyone who knew or suspected something was murdered, but also their wives and relatives. So it is not surprising that in the early 1930s Stalin had millions of kulaks and numerous “sub-kulaks” or “kulak friends” killed and that he then set about exterminating Lenin’s guards, towards whom he had feelings of inferiority. But Antonov-Ovseyenko is not a supporter of Trotsky, because in his eyes Trotsky could compete with Stalin “in terms of dictatorship, self-love and belief in one’s own infallibility.” Even on Lenin his judgment is not unreservedly positive, for Lenin showed an incomprehensible degree of weakness and blindness towards Stalin, although he warned against him in his “Testament.” Even industrialization does not justify Stalin, as it was in good part a “hoax” using fake numbers. Cruelty at the center radiated deep into the periphery: when Chechens resisted evacuation orders during the war, they were locked in barns and burned alive; when the Germans approached the town of Oryol, the prisoners of the NKVD prison were herded into the basements and the rooms were flooded, killing all 5,000. (Similar things were reported from Lemberg.) It is said of Hitler that he only came to power through Stalin and his theory of social fascism of the social democrats and that the only medal that the Soviet generalissimo really deserved was a German Iron Cross, because the war had been won not by Stalin, but in spite of Stalin, with enormous losses for which the Supreme Commander was largely responsible. But every reader of the book has to ask himself the question: what kind of party was it that allowed “a filthy criminal to establish himself in the Kremlin”; what kind of regime was that, in which a single “man-eater” could keep many millions of people in constant fear, a mass murderer who, while linked to Hitler through the causal nexus of his crucial support, was compared to the German dictator, must be considered as the “Asiatic” and therefore worse manifestation?! It is hardly the intention, but as a consequence, Antonov-Ovseyenko’s interpretation leads to the self-rejection of an entire Soviet or Russian generation, namely to the thesis that “everyone” was guilty.

A third ideal-typical way of coming to terms with the terrible past is embodied in Vasily Grossman’s book “Life and Fate,” which was completed in 1960, four years before the author’s death and only published in the West twenty years later: the possibility of the radical, but understanding self-criticism. At the center of the book is the great battle for Stalingrad and the Soviet victory that marked the turning point of the war. Grossman tells of the bravery of the surrounded Soviet soldiers, whose leaders are almost without exception tried and tested Bolsheviks like the battalion commissar Krymov or the defender of the legendary house “six dash one,” whose defensive struggle draws the admiration of the whole country. He also tells without hate, although without admiration, of the German attackers and the hardships they had to endure. Above all, however, he tells of the powerful, well-prepared attack by the Soviet troops, which leads to the encirclement of the German 6th Army within 100 hours and which Stalin closely observed and directed from distant Moscow. Although a particularly bright light falls on the tank commander Novikov, who postpones a decisive attack by eight minutes against the will of his general and Stalin, because that way the enormous losses that would have inevitably occurred at an earlier point in time could be avoided, Grossman obviously has no intention of denying the praise they deserve from the heroic deeds of the officers and soldiers, or from the decisions of Stalin. The victory of Stalingrad remains for him a heroic and world-historical feat, even though it was planned by a man who in peacetime had killed millions of his fellow human beings and was carried out by men who had helped this despot to oppress an entire nation. When Krymov was arrested off the battlefield on unfounded suspicion of anti-Party activity and taken to the Lubyanka, his own past life appeared in a completely new light in the torment of the night-long interrogations and torture. Had he not been all too indifferent when friends and acquaintances told him horrific details of their imprisonment or made a critical remark about Stalin and then begged him in deep terror: “Not a word to anyone, not to your wife, not to your mother; one word, and I'm lost!”? Had he not, too, once “never hesitated to deal with enemies”; had he thought for a minute many years ago how the Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, priests and kulaks felt when he threw them into prison? And now a pitiless man, who did not take part in the revolution because he was still a child, interrogates him and coolly refutes some of the statements that he, Krymov, firmly believes are correct, with the help of a thick folder in which all more important events of his life are collected through testimonies from informers—his friends, his relatives, even his wife. Now he recognizes “himself” in the man who interrogated and who had his kidneys smashed—the one who was one of the activists of a revolution of which he must say now: “Maybe it wasn’t a revolution at all, what the hell kind of revolution is that—that’s the Black Hundreds, vermin.” Thus, in the author’s reflections, good turns into evil, and the difference between the communist revolution and the fascist counter-revolution disappears: what Stalin brought into the world is nothing other than what Hitler created, namely “state national socialism,” and this state national socialism is the same monster, whether the supposedly legitimate Soviet question about social origins or the bloody German question about nationality is being asked; as the “totalitarianism” that it is, it has the same terrible effect whether it is currently undertaking the extermination of Ukrainian Jews in an atmosphere of hatred and disgust, or whether ten years earlier it was waging the extermination campaign against the Kulaks as a class on the same ground. Yes, Grossman only makes a slight internal distancing when he has an SS officer address the captured old Bolshevik as “teacher.” And yet the harshness of these statements does not mean the self-rejection of the Russian people, because Stalin appears—unlike Antonov-Ovseyenko—not as a “criminal,” but as a historical figure of high, if terrible, rank.

However, one could ask whether this is really a Russian self-examination and self-criticism, or whether Grossman does not see himself more as a Jew. Indeed, his sympathy evidently belongs to a large extent to the fate of the Jews, and at the heart of the novel is the moving description of a gassing in Auschwitz. But immediately afterwards he tells of the “starvation camp” in which many Soviet prisoners of war perished, and he makes it vividly clear that slow starvation is a much more agonizing event than rapid death by gas. And this death by starvation in the German camp is not isolated, but the view goes straight back to the Ukraine, where communists handed over the “kulak vermin” to starvation by the hundreds of thousands. One could even claim that Grossman practices a Jewish self-criticism at the same time as a Russian one, because he derives antisemitism from three characteristics of the Jews, each of which can also be found in other minorities, but whose combination he declares to be unique. One of these characteristics is the extensive and highly productive activity in many areas of life and not least in the revolution, where many Jews “made a name” for themselves. At one point Grossman even says that there are considerations by some intelligent Jews that culminate in the realization that the murder of the Jews was necessary for the happiness of mankind and that they should consciously carry out this self-sacrifice. This is an exact and astonishing correspondence to views that were current among the Russian bourgeoisie and which, in Grossman’s case, are certainly not to be derived from “Jewish self-hatred.” Rather, his book is a great example of Russian and Jewish self-criticism that does not involve self-rejection.

The basic possibilities inherent in the Russian “coming to terms with the past,” this unavoidable task of the Russians, which is so similar and yet so unlike that of the Germans, should be brought out through the protagonists’ own words, and it cannot be said that they compellingly pointed ahead to the events of 1991. Under Gorbachev, a historical alternative emerged in the years from 1987 to 1990, which might have moderated the criticism of the past, but also the violent rebellion against development, and assigned a new role to the Soviet Union. With the introduction and assumption of the office of President, the general secretary of the CPSU sent a widely visible signal, and the Cold War came to a definitive end in those final months of 1990, when Germany was reunited, communist autocracy in the states of East Central Europe ended and the declaration of the heads of government of 34 CSCE states on the joint construction of a democratic, pluralistic, market economy in Europe was signed by Gorbachev. The CPSU could no longer have resisted the admission of other parties, having previously given up its claim to sole possession of historical truth, and after overcoming, albeit considerable difficulties it might have become the leading party of Soviet progress and Russian tradition, so that the regime would have been markedly different from the Western form of pluralism, without opposing it with universal claims and proclaiming a future victory. In terms of attitudes towards its own past, this would presumably have meant that such a balanced portrayal of Stalin as that of the former political general Volkogonov would have become authoritative, but that Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” would also have found its way to the Russian public. Then the Soviet Union—if it had not continued the old policy of repression in the Baltics and elsewhere—may have been called a “free country” it would have remained far removed from rampant licentiousness of a libertarianism driving itself to hedonism and the paradoxically associated urge for prosecutorial approach to history that was unmistakably evident in Germany and even in France.

The clumsy coup by communist traditionalists in the party and army in August 1991 destroyed that possibility by its failure, and thereby the Soviet Union fell into disintegration into its component parts; Russia became a pluralistic state, albeit under the leadership or behind the smokescreen of a strong presidency, which no longer had, or did not yet have, the social foundations of such pluralism. Thus, antisemitism, which, unlike in National Socialist Germany, had been suppressed by the regime and even threatened with the death penalty, re-emerged in public, while anti-Zionism was promoted. It was not just a contradiction when pictures of Stalin were openly carried across the street during demonstrations, or when former Chekists openly boasted about their deeds in letters to the editor. The economy, which had been “privatized” using very questionable methods, entered the process of “capitalist globalization” without much resistance, but the “mafia-like” structures which had already made themselves felt under the Soviet system, now seemed to be on the way to autocracy, albeit no longer totalitarian, but quasi-pluralistic autocracy. The fate of the “Russian Federation” and the territories of the former Soviet Union that have become independent is uncertain and leaves little room for well-founded predictions. But there are favorable possibilities for the dispute over the interpretation of the past, which form a far broader spectrum than in Germany.

Beyond all the differences, however, the following can be said about this century and its epochs at the chronological end of the 20th century:

Born out of the First World War, the Russian Revolution of the Bolsheviks was the most important and momentous event of the century, because it violently attempted to realize socialism, that is, an ancient idea of humanity that had been brought into a modern form by Marx and Engels. The attempt failed simply because Marx and Engels had combined incompatible ideas, namely world unity, family-like character, and the abolition of apparatuses and objectification. But it gave countless people great hope and aroused a hitherto unknown hatred in many others. This paved the way for a militant counter-movement that could draw on the still unbroken strength of nationalism and which produced an ideology that was based more on assumptions and postulates than on hopes and insights, an ideology which, in practice, was just as much, albeit in a different way, a “human extermination machine” as the Bolshevik system had been before it. Thus the period from 1917 to 1945 did not become the era of the proletarian world revolution, as Lenin had believed, but the era of fascism and the European civil war between radical fascist National Socialism of Germany and the increasingly state-oriented Bolshevism of the Soviet Union.

Soon after the end of the Second World War, in 1947, the era of the Cold War began, in which the countries of Europe played only secondary roles alongside the main antagonists, the planned economy of the Soviet Union and the market economy of the United States. There was talk of a “world civil war” with “conversion potential” on both ides, although non-ideological pragmatism has been gaining ground in the USA since the 1960s and the Marxist ideology of the Soviet Union and its satellites was losing strength and credibility. Economic and intellectual freedom combined with increasing prosperity eventually proved to be stronger and more attractive; the strategy of détente, even embrace, was far more successful than the strategy of militant confrontation in the European civil war; the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, but Russia remained a large, albeit weakened, state. Today one no longer needs to demand that the world must distance itself further and further from the era of fascism and the European civil war, for this distance has long been an unmistakable reality. But this has by no means made it certain that the world is heading towards a future free of conflict, or even one with little conflict; only the war between great powers of equal rank, waged with all technical means, has become unthinkable and practically impossible. A definitive historical judgment on the violent socialism that seized power in Russia in 1917, and also on the violent nationalism that prevailed in Germany under the name National Socialism, will only be possible when it has become clear what the consequences of the unchained “capitalist globalization” and the constantly advancing liberalism have brought about. On the other hand, the question of how to understand the relationship between the two most important totalitarianisms of the 20th century—as a relationship of contradictory opposition, parallelism or a “causal nexus” between original and distorted copy, or as a teacher-pupil relationship, as it is formulated or at least hinted at by Solzhenitsyn and Grossman—can already be left to scholarly debate today, as long as moral and historical judgments are not confused.

Anyone who tries to squeeze the new and major problems of the 21st century into the questions and emotions of the 20th century, who uses the terms “communism” and “fascism” for example, even though the relevant self-designation is not given by the political opponents and there are significant differences recognizable, is doing the future a disservice. Certainly there are continuities and renaissances in history, but Lenin’s and Stalin’s Bolshevism, and even more so Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascism, have passed away since 1991 to such an extent that they should now finally become objects of scholarly reflection rather than objects or pretexts for partisan polemics.