Communism and fascism

ROBERT STRAYER

Among the defining phenomena of the twentieth century, none had a greater world historical significance than communism and fascism. To varying degrees, both operated on a global scale.

Beyond their vast global significance, fascism and communism have in­trigued world historians because of their almost simultaneous emergence and their connections to one another. Their common origins in Europe, the earliest location of the modern transformation, reflected the distinctive discontents of modernity - new forms of class conflict, the instability of capitalist economies, the popularization of nationalist, socialist, and racist ideologies, for example. While each derived from very distinct intellectual and cultural genealogies, communism and fascism both arose as viable political projects from a fragmented and bitterly divided European civiliza­tion during the First World War.

The comparative impulse of world historians is yet another reason why they find communism and fascism fascinating, although the comparisons between them have long been highly controversial. Soviet communists and their sympathizers, victorious in a bitter and bloody war with fascists, strenuously resisted any efforts to find similarities between their own regimes and those of their hated enemies. Thus they deeply resented Western analyses during the Cold War that defined both as “totalitarian” and even “criminal,” with some arguing that communism was even “worse” than fascism.^[474] The fading of communism as the twentieth century ended opened up some space in which more dispassionate comparisons of communism and fascism could take place. A growing recognition of considerable variation within both the communist and fascist worlds likewise offered grist for the comparative mill of world history. Considering communism and fascism as ideologies, as political and social movements, and as regimes exercising state power provides three categories of analysis for examining these tremen­dously important features of twentieth-century world history.

Communism and fascism as ideologies

Ideologies consist of ideas and values about public life, understandings as to how society works or ought to work, and contain both views of history and visions of the future.

The ideologies of twentieth-century communists were rooted firmly in the nineteenth-century thought of Karl Marx. Understanding history as class conflict, Marx had celebrated the age of industrial capitalism as a time of enormous material progress, virtually eliminating the necessity of poverty and human misery. But that novel possibility was blocked by the fatal flaws of capitalism - private property, mounting inequalities, worsening cycles of economic expansion and contraction, intensifying class struggles, competi­tive and individualistic values. No wonder then that capitalism was doomed to collapse in a revolutionary upheaval ignited by an exploited working class. What followed, Marx argued, would eventually be an international socialist federation, without poverty, classes, war, or coercive political authority; a rationally planned and egalitarian community in which genuinely human possibilities might be fully realized.

Born in the most economically advanced parts of Western Europe, that rich fund of ideas underwent significant transformation as it took root, first in Russia and later in China and elsewhere. Here “communism” was born, distinct from the “social democratic” and “socialist” traditions and move­ments that characterized Western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was Lenin who adapted Marxism to the conditions of Russia, where capitalist industrialization had only just begun and where a still autocratic state denied the openings to democracy and trade unionism that were becoming more available in Western Europe. One of Lenin's ideological innovations involved the classic Marxist notion of revolution. By the end of the nineteenth century, many European socialists had largely abandoned the need for revolution, believing that socialism could be gradually and peace­fully realized via incremental reforms and democratic processes.

Furthermore, he argued that such a revolution could be genuinely social­ist. In this respect he was going against the grain of conventional Marxist thinking, which held that a socialist revolution was most likely in those economically advanced countries where capitalism and democracy had already laid the foundation of abundance and freedom, essential for a socialist transformation. To Lenin, however, a relatively backward Russia was the weak link in the capitalist world. A socialist upheaval there, he argued, would trigger revolutions in the more advanced countries, thus giving rise to a world communist movement. Here was an understanding of revolution that depended more on human will and determination than on a particular stage of economic development.

That conception required a second ideological innovation - about the nature of the Party. Socialist parties in Western Europe were large and inclusive, seeking to enroll as many members as possible in order to enhance their influence in the democratic politics of their countries. Lenin, however, argued for a party that was small, tightly organized, highly disciplined, and led by professional revolutionaries who would be able to seize the revolu­tionary moment when it arrived. That conception of the party derived both from Russian autocracy, which made open political activity impossible, and from Lenin's distrust of the workers, who, he feared, could be easily seduced by merely reformist measures that would leave a hated capitalism intact.

Further ideological innovations followed with Stalin in the late 1920s and 1930s. It had become clear that no European revolutionary upheaval would come to the rescue of the backward Soviet Union. Furthermore, the threat of fascism became increasingly apparent. The result was the notion of “social­ism in one country,” a “go-it-alone” strategy that implied a central role for the state in mobilizing resources for rapid industrialization and the “building of socialism.”

Although much of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist version of communist ideology carried over into Chinese communism, Mao Zedong argued for several additional variations.

Beyond the variations and innovations in communist ideology lay certain bedrock commonalities. Communism everywhere was a thoroughly modernist ideology, its eye firmly on the future of an industrial and abundant society with little idealization or romanticism about the past. There was in fact a utopian element in that ideology, despite Marx's adamant rejection of “utopian socialism.” “We will remake life anew - right down to the last buttons of your vest,” wrote the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.^[475] Beyond changing society, communist ideology affirmed the possibility of transform­ing human consciousness in the direction of selflessness and service to the collective. Stalin and many Chinese leaders often referred to teachers and writers as “engineers of the human soul.” This rather non-Marxist voluntarist faith in the power of human action to transform both society and the self was accompanied by a certainty about a successful outcome, born of the belief that Marxism represented scientifically derived truths about the laws of history.

Fascist ideology has been far more amorphous than its communist counter­part, even inchoate, and difficult to define with any precision. The term fascism derives from Mussolini's Italy, though scholars have used it to characterize a more widespread phenomenon, of which Nazi Germany was the prime exemplar, even though Hitler himself seldom used the term. Unlike commun­ism, anchored as it was in the single source of Karl Marx's writings, fascism had many parents. It drew on a melange of ideas current around the end of the nineteenth-century: radical nationalism, racial theories, anti-Semitic thought, a philosophical “revolt against positivism,” Social Darwinism, artistic “futurism,” and more. But no core text served as a point of common reference for advocates of fascism.

Both fascist and communist ideology represented revolutionary responses to the multiple discontents of industrial modernity and to political liberalism - its many conflicts of class, gender, party, and nation, its erosion of traditional communities in the name of individualism, its pervasive materialism. “There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it,” declared Hitler in 1934. “There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling.”^[476] And Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist. Both communists and fascists looked forward to overthrowing existing governments, creating societies with new values, and generating a new kind of human consciousness. In both, there was a sense of entering a new and fresh age of utopian possibilities - for the Nazis, a purified Aryan people constructing a new racial order in Europe, and for the communists, the universal liberation of humankind from the scourge of capitalism.

Confronting the social atomization of bourgeois society, both ideologies emphasized the primacy of the collective or the group - for the communists, an international body of workers, and for fascists, the collectivity of the nation. Fascist thought viewed the nation as a natural and organic unit, which had, however, become corrupt, decadent, and divided as unrestricted capitalism, party politics, feminism, socialism, and the smug complacency of bourgeois society took hold. The great revolutionary task of fascism was to purify and renew the nation while giving it a grand mission on the world stage. It was less a social upheaval such as communists imagined and more of a cultural or moral transformation that would result in the rebirth of the nation and the creation of a “New Man,” described by Hitler as “slim and slender, quick like a greyhound, tough like leather, and hard like Krupp steel.” The novelty and the mass appeal of fascism, as compared to other right-wing ideologies, lay in this revolutionary and future-oriented posture, in its ability to capture the mystique of revolution on behalf of anti­democratic and anti-communist ideals, and in its embrace of modern tech­nologies of communication such as radio and film.^[477]

The extreme nationalism of fascist ideology accounts for its “negations,” its vitriolic rejection of much that was a part of modern European thinking by the beginning of the twentieth century. Like the communists, fascists despised liberal political theory, rooted as it was in the idea that individuals had an existence independent of class, state, or nation. Democracy divided the nation into bickering political parties, enabling mediocrity and compro­mise rather than excellence and decisive action. Socialism pitted class against class, while feminism put men and women at odds. And classic conservatism feared revolution and looked to the past rather than the future. All of these fascism rejected.

But this fascist rejection of modern life was selective rather than wholesale. While they may have spoken romantically about the Roman Empire or medieval German peasant communities, fascists embraced science, technol­ogy, industry, mass politics, and all the military power that modernity could generate. What they sought was an alternative and disciplined modernity in service to the nation, shorn of the disrupting and corrosive features that it had assumed in liberal democratic societies.

Fascist ideology spoke the language of emotion, myth, will, and action rather than thought, rationality, and reflection. It emphasized “mobilizing passions" - resentments, prejudices, a sense of victimization - as a means of binding a national community together.^[478] A leader, emerging from the people and mystically bound to them, embodied the will of the nation and enabled its mission in the world. Struggle, violence, and war were positive virtues in fascist thought, as they ennobled humanity and allowed the stronger and the superior to prevail over the weak and inferior. “Those who want to live, let them fight,” declared Hitler in Mein Kampf. This valorization of all things military was associated with an extreme emphasis on the masculine principle, a corresponding “flight from the feminine,” and a “pathological fear of... softness.”^[479]

Much of this was common to fascist thought wherever it was found. But the German or Nazi version of fascist ideology was clearly distinctive, particularly in its understanding of the nation and its enemies. Hitler and the Nazis drew on a heavily romantic strain of German nationalism known as volkisch or people's thought. It depicted an idealized German people, mysti­cally related to a sacred landscape and expressing a unique German soul - more natural, spiritual, intuitive, and idealistic than the rationalist humanism of Britain and France (Fig. 17.1). Such thinking was particularly compatible with the pseudo-scientific racist ideas that were percolating in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century, and in Hitler and the Nazis those ideas became central to German fascism, far more so than in Italy or elsewhere.

To the Nazis, German nationality was defined, not just in terms of culture, language, or law, which might be acquired or accepted by anyone, but by blood or race, which was permanent, indelible, and inheritable only by birth. Purity of race was, therefore, critical, lest the nation suffer the pollution born of mixing with inferiors, thus corrupting its very soul. “The stronger must dominate,” Hitler wrote, “and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness.” Drawing on a long and varied tradition of European anti­Semitism, Hitler presented the Jews as the chief source of that pollution, associated alike with liberalism and the “egoism of the individual,” with the greedy money-lending features of capitalism, and with a despised Soviet communism. Thus, Jews came to embody all that was negated in fascist

Figure 17.1 “Hilf auch Du mit!” German Nazi propaganda poster showing women helping in the war effort, 1941

(Masterprints/Alamy)

ideology. The great task of the Nazis was to carry out a racial revolution, to eliminate this dire threat to German national greatness. This radical and violent obsession with race and the “Jewish threat” marks Nazi thinking as a unique form of fascist ideology, in degree if not in kind.

Communism and fascism as social movements

Such ideologies provided the foundation for social movements, usually embodied in a political organization or a party. Those parties, communist and fascist alike, propagated their ideas, recruited members, struggled with their opponents, sometimes contested elections, and strategized about seiz­ing the power of the state. The great divide among these movements lies between those that did achieve state power, thus becoming regimes, and those that remained in opposition to the established order.

Among communist movements, pride of place clearly belongs to that of Russia, for that movement initiated world communism when the Bolshevik party seized power during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Later renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin, began in 1903 as a small break-away faction of the larger Marxist organization, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Bolsheviks spent much of the next decade in fierce controversy with other socialist and Marxist groups, remaining small, often marginal, though with some support among the industrial workers of major cities. The First World War gave the Bolsheviks their opportunity. While many of the non-communist socialist parties supported the increasingly unpopular war, Bolshevik demands to end it gained them a hearing outside of their own small circles. The enormous strains of that conflict forced the abdication of the Tsar in February of 1917, placed an ineffective Provisional Government in power, and generated a mounting radicalism, especially among urban workers, women, and soldiers in a losing and demoralized army. In those desperate circumstances, the Bolshevik message of immediate socialist revolution and ending the war gained wider support, allowing that small party to seize state power in October of 1917. Communists now governed the world's largest country.

Like its Russian counterpart, China's communist movement came to power during a vast revolutionary upheaval. But that upheaval was far more extended, requiring Chinese communists to struggle for some twenty-eight years (1921-1949) before gaining control of the central state. In the course of that struggle, Chinese communists found their primary source of support among the peasants in the rural areas rather than among urban workers as the Bolsheviks had. Furthermore, while the Bolsheviks gained credibility by their willingness to leave a disastrous First World War, the Chinese communist movement did so through its vigorous resistance to Japanese imperialism in the Second World War.

Other communist movements came to power in still different circum­stances. Those in most of Eastern Europe did so in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, largely imposed by Soviet forces that had liberated those countries from Nazi occupation. In Yugoslavia, by contrast, local communists had liberated themselves from fascist rule, and on that basis were able to establish an independent communist regime in their country. In Vietnam, a communist party established in 1930 led a successful nationalist struggle against French, Japanese, and later American imperial­ism, thus ensuring a communist regime in an independent Vietnam. A Cuban communist regime did not derive from a communist movement at all. Rather it was the product of a decision in the early 1960s by Castro's intensely nationalist and vaguely socialist government to align openly with the Soviet Union in the face of American hostility.

Elsewhere communist movements played various roles in political life without achieving state power. Strong electoral showings by French and Italian communist parties after the Second World War, based on their fervent anti-fascist activities during the war, partially motivated US aid to those countries and perhaps stimulated various welfare state measures across Europe, both in an effort to reduce the appeal of communism. During the 1970s, a Euro-communist alliance of French, Italian, and Spanish parties projected an independent “socialism with a human face.” In the United States, vastly exaggerated fears of infiltration by a small communist party gave rise to the McCarthy “red scare” in the early 1950s and shaped US political discourse for decades.

An Indonesian communist party took shape during the 1920s, participated actively in the struggle for independence from Dutch rule, and by the early 1960s was the largest non-ruling communist party in the world. Its growing popularity threatened Indonesia's government and military establishment, which unleashed a brutal crackdown in 1965, killing hundreds of thousands of suspected communists and largely destroying the party. A final example of an active but non-governing communist movement comes from Peru, where a Maoist-inspired group, commonly known as the Shining Path, launched in the early 1980s a guerrilla war campaign of assassinations and sabotage that targeted a wide range of people opposed to its extreme ideology. It soon came to exercise control or influence in a substantial area of central Peru, generating tens of thousands of casualties in the process. The government's efforts to subdue the movement in the 1990s paralleled the violence of the Shining Path. Elsewhere as well, in Nepal, South Africa, and India, for example, self-defined communist movements have participated actively and sometimes violently in their countries' political lives. And in the south Indian state of Kerala, as well as in various French and Italian cities, communist parties have held local power for extended periods.

The major fascist movements that came to power in Italy and Germany, unlike their communist counterparts, did so within existing political frame­works and with the support of mainstream conservative elements. Both movements operated in new states in which liberal parliamentary democracy had not become deeply rooted. The First World War and its aftermath then created the conditions in which these fascist movements took shape - political deadlock, sharp and violent social conflict, and resentments about the Treaty of Versailles.

In Italy, where a fascist movement quickly achieved power by 1922, the immediate postwar years witnessed growing violence amid a wave of strikes and land seizures, and the mounting popularity of Italian socialists, inspired now by the Russian Revolution. Numerous right-wing nationalist groups also surfaced, resentful about the limited territorial gains granted to Italy at Versailles. Into this volatile mix stepped a charismatic journalist and former socialist Benito Mussolini, leader of a revolutionary nationalist movement called the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, established in 1919 and transformed into a more genuine political party in 1921. Mussolini's movement contrib­uted much to the violence of those years, especially in the activities of the Black Shirts, a private paramilitary force of disillusioned veterans and unem­ployed men. But Mussolini's promise to bring peace and order to a chaotic country also attracted the support of property owners and established authorities. Thus following his unsuccessful but highly threatening March on Rome in late 1922, Mussolini was invited to form a government (Fig. 17.2). The first fascist regime to achieve state power had done so in a quasi-legal fashion.

The rise to power of Germany's Nazi Party occurred in broadly similar circumstances, though it climaxed more than a decade later. In the postwar period, Germans experienced massive inflation, resentful veterans, battling militias of the right and left, an attempted communist takeover in 1919, and a democratic government, tarnished and despised by many for accepting the widely hated Treaty of Versailles. In these conditions a small political party, headed by the charismatic orator Adolph Hitler, took shape. Denouncing

Figure 17.2 Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator and leader of the Fascist movement, with his generals and Fascist troops as they march on Rome on October 6, 1922 (ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy)

communists, exploitative capitalists, Jews, and Versailles, Hitler and his Nazi party had attracted some 55,000 members by 1923. Inspired by Mussolini's March on Rome, they attempted a similar coup in Munich, but failed miserably, and Hitler landed in jail for a year, where he wrote his infamous Mein Kampf. In the somewhat more stable economic and political conditions of 1924-1929, the Nazis grew slowly, reaching 108,000 members by 1929, though attracting only 2.6 per cent of the national vote in elections of 1928.

It was the Great Depression that gave the Nazis their opening. With massive unemployment, political deadlock, and Nazi and communist militias battling on the streets, Hitler presented his movement as the only genuinely national party able to address the economic crisis and the threat of commun­ism. With the backing of various German bankers, businessmen, and political elites, the Nazis won 37 percent of the vote in 1932, and Hitler was appointed chancellor of a new German government in early 1933. Like Mussolini, he had come to power legally with the support of conservative forces who thought they could use and control him. As the Nazi movement quickly became a regime in power, they soon discovered how wrong they had been.

While fascists achieved state power independently only in these two countries, a combination of the Depression and the vitality of the German and Italian movements generated significant fascist movements in Austria, Spain, Hungary, and Romania. In the more solidly established democracies of Western Europe - France, Great Britain, and Belgium, for example - intel­lectuals and small numbers of activists presented a fascist or quasi-fascist message with very little real political impact. Elsewhere, in southern and Eastern Europe, Japan, and parts of Latin America, conservative and author­itarian regimes sometimes adopted the trappings of fascism - state-controlled parties, youth organizations or militias, a rhetoric of national renewal, anti­Semitic measures, political relationships with Germany or Italy - but without the genuinely revolutionary element so characteristic, especially of the Nazis. In Japan, for example, numerous radical right-wing movements shared an extreme nationalism, hostility to parliamentary democracy, commitment to elite leadership centered on an exalted emperor, and dedication to foreign expansion. In sharp contrast to developments in Italy and Germany, no such party gained widespread popular support or control of the state. Fascists generally did not understand themselves as part of a global movement as so many communists did for so long. Nothing like the Soviet-sponsored Comintern (1919-1943) and Cominform (1947-1956) arose to co-ordinate the activities of fascist or semi-fascist movements.

Communism and fascism as regimes

In places where movements became regimes, fascists and communists alike had the opportunity to put their ideologies into practice. In doing so they remade the world of the twentieth century. Italy, Germany, Russia, and China represent the classic examples of this process and provide many occasions for comparison.

The most frequently noted commonalities among all of these regimes are those that distinguish them collectively from liberal democratic societies and from more conventional authoritarian states. Those commonalities have often been subsumed in the much debated concept of “totalitarianism.” At a minimum, it suggests a party-dominated state, led by a single individual with enormous power, which sought to penetrate and control society and individuals in the name of a transformational and utopian ideology. All of these regimes eliminated opposition parties or groups, dominated public communication and education, and created party-controlled mass organiza­tions for young people, women, workers, professional groups, and more. Thus the sphere of legitimate private and civic life contracted sharply, while that of collective or public life, under the watchful eye of a party/state, grew enormously.

Yet variations abounded. For fascists the supremacy of the state was a core value, although the Nazis privileged the party over the state, at least in theory. “Fascism conceives of the state as an absolute,” declared Mussolini, “in comparison with which all individuals and groups are relative... The state... is a spiritual and moral fact in itself.”^[480] By contrast, the growth of state power for communists ran against the grain of Marxist ideology with its promise ofliberation from coercive authority and the “withering away of the state.” Therefore it was rationalized as a temporary necessity owing to the backwardness of Russia and China and their need to catch up with more advanced capitalist countries, which threatened these fledgling revolutions.

Furthermore, in establishing fascist regimes, Italy and Germany tamed, often dominated, and sometimes compromised with traditional institutions and elites, such as the army, church, and bureaucracy, but did not seek to eliminate or completely replace them. Although Italian fascists created the term totalitarian, they were the least effective in implementing it, and fascist Italy remained a semi-pluralistic state. Mussolini, for example, came to an agreement with the Vatican in the Lateran Accords (1929), which allowed many Italians to be Catholic and fascist at the same time, though various conflicts between church and state persisted. Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, on the other hand, destroyed their landlord classes, created new military forces, frontally attacked religious institutions, and made strenuous efforts to train their own technical and managerial experts so as to end an embarrassing reliance on “bourgeois specialists.”

Such differences in the practice of “totalitarianism” find expression in the kind of control that fascist and communist regimes sought to exercise over the economy. In Italy and Germany alike, the basic elements of a capitalist economy - private property, the profit motive, and market relations - were retained. The state, however, intervened to regulate, control, and direct the economy in the interests of the nation. Public works and military spending, the banning of trade unions and strikes, wage and price controls, protective tariffs and restrictions on imports, the formation of industrial cartels, financial support for various banks and industries - these were among the interven­tionist techniques that fascist regimes used to manage their economies.

Communist regimes went much further, essentially eliminating private ownership of productive property. Agricultural lands were seized from their former owners and transformed into state or collective farms. In the Soviet Union that vast transformation took place between 1928 and 1932 against widespread resistance, and was often seen by peasants as a return to serfdom. The corresponding process in China (1952-1956) occurred with much less resistance and violence, owing in part to the long-time presence of the communist party in the countryside. Industry too was removed from private owners, coming under the direct control of state authorities and making every worker a state employee. A series of “five-year plans” detailed every feature of the economy - where factories should be located, what they would produce and in what quantities, to whom they would sell their products and at what price, and how much workers would be paid. In these ways, com­munist regimes were more “totalitarian” than their fascist counterparts.

All of these “totalitarian” regimes sought to mobilize mass support for and participation in their transformational efforts. But in mobilizing women, fascist and communist regimes differed substantially. Fascists granted women what they regarded as a critical role, though one that was limited and highly circumscribed. Deeply anti-feminist and resentful of the liberating changes that modern life had brought to European women, fascist authorities wanted to limit women largely to the home, removing them from the paid workforce. To Hitler, the state was the natural domain of men, while the home was the realm of women. Even in wartime conditions of labor shortage, Nazi authorities were reluctant to employ women as factory workers. Concerned about declining birth rates, Italy and Germany alike promoted a cult of motherhood, glorifying women who produced children for the state. Mussolini once opined that twelve children was an ideal family size. Financial incentives and public honors were offered to those who produced large families. Accordingly, fascist regimes generally opposed abortion, contraception, family planning, and sex education, all of which were associated with feminist thinking.

Yet such an outlook did not necessarily coincide with puritanical sexual attitudes. In Germany, a state-sponsored system of brothels was initiated in the mid-1930s, for it was assumed that virile men would be promiscuous and that soldiers required a sexual outlet, if they were to contribute to the nation's military strength. Himmler openly encouraged illegitimate births among Aryans in order to augment the nation's numbers, and condoms were exempted from a Nazi ban on all contraceptives in 1941. Particularly during the war, Nazi rhetoric about the chaste Aryan family was trumped - or supplemented - by a concern to use sexuality to advance the cause of the nation.

Communist approaches to mobilizing women operated in a quite different framework, at least initially. Upon seizing power in Russia, the Bolsheviks initiated a remarkable program of state-directed feminism. A series of laws and decrees gave women legal equality and the vote, made marriage a civil procedure and a “free union of equal citizens,” allowed wives to keep their own family names, made divorce easy, legalized abortion, and ended legal discrimination against illegitimate children. An organization called Zhenotdel (the Women's Department) trained women to run their own day-care centers and medical clinics, promoted literacy and pre-natal education for women, invited Muslim women to discard their veils, and in hundreds of conferences for women encouraged them to aspire beyond traditional roles. One Zhenotdel publication asked, “Can a woman be a metal worker?” The answer was a decided “Yes.” Something similar took shape in China after the communists came to power in 1949. The Marriage Law of 1950 directly attacked patriarchal and Confucian traditions such as arranged marriages, child brides, and concubinage, while permitting widows to remarry and granting women equal property rights with men.

But communist feminism had its limits as well. In 1930, Stalin declared that the “woman's question” had been solved, and little public discussion of women's issues was permitted over the next several decades, while the drive to industrialize took priority. An earlier emphasis on sexual liberation was replaced in the 1930s by an emphasis on a stable family life in which sexuality was subordinated to the great task of “building socialism.” Stalin's Soviet Union was in some respects more sexually repressive than Hitler's Germany. Both regimes were willing to sacrifice some core values (a chaste nuclear family for the Nazis and sexual liberation for the Soviets) in order to further pressing national interests.^[481] In one respect, however, the difference remained. While fascist policies sought to remove women from the labor force, communist authorities almost everywhere actively encouraged women, including married women, to work outside the home in order to assist the massive economic development efforts that characterized commu­nist regimes. Because those regimes did little to address patriarchy in the home, women were left with the famous “double burden” of paid labor in addition to housework and childcare.

More than their dictatorial leaders, economic policies, or postures toward women, what distinguished “totalitarian” regimes from other political sys­tems were extreme forms of violence tied to their transformational goals. Informed by an “eschatological ideology of redemption,” those regimes sought to remake their societies, creating a “new man,” a more fully devel­oped human being than the citizens of Western liberal states, exemplified in the racially pure and ruthless SS officer in Germany and the selfless Stakhanovite worker in the USSR. Such efforts, in turn, shaped the kind of violence that these regimes undertook as they reached for a “world cleansed of the excluded.”^[482] Those utopian visions, fascist and communist alike, cer­tainly contributed to a willingness to employ the most brutal means to achieve them. For fascists, the celebration of violence and war as ennobling for humankind further justified extraordinary violence, while Marxist notions of bitter class struggle did so for communists.

In Nazi Germany, the excluded or the “unfit” were defined in biological or racial terms, including the mentally or physically handicapped, homosexuals, the Roma, Slavic peoples, and, most prominently, the Jews. Before the war, over 100,000 “incurably sick” and handicapped people were put to death in a program of euthanasia, and tens of thousands of so-called “asocials” - criminals, vagrants, prostitutes, pimps, alcoholics, homosexuals, and “idlers" - were arrested and often placed in concentration camps, where many of them subsequently perished. But it was in the context of war itself that the most horrendous violence took shape, as active persecution and isolation of the Jews within Germany escalated into the Holocaust within the expanding domains of conquered territory. Some 6 million Jews and several hundred thousand Roma perished in an extraordinary effort to wipe entire peoples from the face of the earth. Furthermore, as German control extended over Poland and the western Soviet Union, some 3 million Poles were executed or murdered, another 3 million Soviet POWs died in captivity, about 4 million slave laborers perished amid horrendous conditions, and plans were laid to allow some 30 million to starve to death in the conquered territories in the east^[483] - all of this in an effort to open up “living space” for German settlers. Nazi violence was thus distinctive in several ways - in its bio-racial definition of the enemy, in its industrialized and clearly genocidal killing machine, and in the absence of any practical political threat to the regime from its victims.

Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China were likewise perme­ated by violence, though to different degrees and in different ways. While the Bolshevik takeover in Russia occasioned relatively few casualties, the Civil War that followed (1918-1921) witnessed extreme brutality on both sides, generated perhaps 7-8 million deaths, militarized the communist party, and increased its inclination to resort to force as it sought to restore order to a ravaged country. The collectivization of agriculture (1928-1932) produced another spasm of violence as communist forces overcame resistance to this social upheaval, while labeling the more well-to-do peasants as kulaks, most of whom were exiled in remote regions of the country or sent to Gulag labor camps. Some 2 million people died in this process, while another 5 or 6 million perished in the famine that followed. The climax of Stalinist violence occurred in the “Terror” of the late 1930s, when a wide range of “enemies of the revolution” were sent to the Gulag (perhaps 4-5 million), where they were worked, often to death, in horrendous conditions, while close to another million were summarily executed. Adding to the upheavals of the Stalinist era was a series of violent ethnic cleansings that sought to reorder Soviet society in ethnically homogeneous territories, and especially during the war to prevent or punish collaboration with German forces. That the deportation of many millions did not descend into mass murder, as in Germany, owed something to the availability of space in Central Asia where they could be relocated or dumped and left to fend for themselves.

In China, the most extensive violence occurred in the few years after the communist seizure of power in 1949, as the party mobilized the peasants to confront the landlords, seizing and redistributing their property. It was, as Mao put it, “not a dinner party.” Estimates of the number of landlords killed during this process of land reform range between ι and 2 million. In 1957, some 500,000 people - mostly intellectuals and educated people with opi­nions critical of the party line - were stigmatized as “rightists,” a label that largely ended their careers. Few such people were executed as so many had been in the USSR during the 1930s; rather they were sent off to labor camps for “re-education” or “sent down” to rural areas for hard work and to “learn from the peasants.” The Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s created gigantic rural “communes” designed to promote both rapid economic development and collective living. That enormously disruptive process, combined with

Figure 17.3 Chinese Red Guards, high school and university students, waving copies of Chairman Mao Zedong's “Little Red Book,” parade in Beijing's streets at the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in June 1966

(Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

bad weather, swept some 30 to 40 million people to their deaths in a massive famine, caused in large measure by communist policies. Mao's fear that the Chinese Communist Party was losing its revolutionary edge led to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1969 in which millions of young people, orga­nized as “Red Guards,” went on the attack against “capitalist-roaders,” essentially anyone who dissented from the increasingly radical vision of communism that Mao espoused (Fig. 17.3). Perhaps 500,000 people died during this massive upheaval, most of them killed by the armed forces sent to repress the radicalism of the Red Guards, which had brought the country to the brink of civil war. Millions more were scarred for life by the humilia­tion, torture, and endless confrontations to which they were subjected, even as additional millions were packed off to labor camps or to the villages to perform menial labor. Thus the extent of regime-sponsored killing in China was far less than in the Soviet Union, but the search for “enemies” persisted, and during the Cultural Revolution escaped the control of the authorities in a way that it never did in the USSR.

While both fascist and communist regimes practiced violence and gener­ated social upheaval on an enormous scale, those processes operated differ­ently. Like their fascist counterparts, communist regimes too were driven to violence by perceived threats to utopian visions. In the Soviet Union and China, however, those defined as enemies were primarily internal and were viewed through the prism of class rather than race. While some 96 percent of the victims of Nazi terror were non-Germans,^[484] the overwhelming majority of Soviet and Chinese casualties of regime violence were citizens of those countries. Furthermore, many of those victims were ardent communists, high-ranking members of the party, and loyal supporters of the regime. After the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, no such action threatened loyal Nazis. Thus Nazi elites enjoyed a security that their communist counterparts under Stalin and Mao could only have envied. Those singled out for exclusion in Hitler's Germany played no real role in the political struggles of that regime, while in communist countries, some of those identified as “enemies” (Bukharin and Kirov in the USSR; Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in China) may arguably have posed an alternative to the policies of Stalin or Mao, though the actual threat they represented to those in power was vastly exaggerated.

Nazi violence was inscribed in its ideology and intrinsic to the regime in a way that communist violence was not. After all, many aspects of Stalinist violence - widespread terror, mass executions, arbitrary arrests, the Gulag camp system - were largely abandoned after the dictator's death in 1953. And communist “enemies,” unlike those in the fascist world, had some possibility for redemption through labor, self-criticism, or wartime service. Chinese communists especially made great efforts at changing attitudes through an extended process involving public confession, severe self-criticism, punish­ment, and re-education.

The “totalitarian” label, widely applied to fascist and communist regimes alike, has been subject to considerable criticism and certainly does not exhaust the nature and meaning of those regimes. Fascist Italy, for example, where the term originated, was clearly less totalitarian that either Nazi Germany or the communist states. Mussolini's power was less absolute than that of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao and depended more on the support of traditional elites. Nor did the Italian regime demand of its own people the extensive personal transformations that were required in these other societies. More generally, the assumption of an all-powerful, efficient state utterly beholden to its leader, has crumbled under a growing awareness among scholars of the competing bureaucratic fiefdoms of Nazi Germany, conflicts between center and periphery in the USSR, policy disagreements in Chinese leadership circles, and widespread corruption and opportunism in many places.

Furthermore, while fascist and communist regimes certainly sought total control over individuals and society, achieving it was no easy matter, and some measure of “private life” persisted. Recognition of this reality led these regimes to develop extensive networks of spies or informants - the Stasi in East Germany, for example - to discover what their people were really thinking. Private religious belief and practice proved especially difficult for would-be totalitarian regimes to penetrate. A 1937 census by Soviet authori­ties revealed that some 57 percent of respondents acknowledged being religious believers,^[485] and Hitler's attack on the churches prompted consider­able criticism.

Earlier studies of fascist and communist regimes often portrayed them as governing almost wholly through fear, coercion, and terror. More recent accounts, while in no way denying the massive violence of those societies, have highlighted other and more voluntary sources of support for those regimes. Certainly there were at times some shared values between regime and society - hatred of Versailles in the case of Germany, social equality and the state as a provider of welfare for the Soviet Union, nationalism and anti­imperialism for China.

Furthermore, some people clearly benefited from those regimes - the unemployed who found work in Nazi factories and building projects, the upwardly mobile in Stalin's USSR, impoverished Chinese peasants who gained access to land. Many people - not least among the socially stigma­tized - tried actively to remake their own sense of self in line with the social engineering efforts and ideological goals of their regimes. Thus Soviet urban workers, newly arrived from the countryside, learned to “speak Bolshevik”; people with kulak backgrounds sought to take on proletarian identities; young people from bourgeois families in China became ardent Red Guards; and many Germans, Nazi activists and ordinary people alike, practiced “working towards the Fuhrer” as they sought deliberately to bond with the

national community taking shape around their charismatic leader.^{[486] [487]} Especially among the young, participation in the building of a brave new world generated excitement and a sense of purpose that brought millions into the Hitler Youth organization, sent ardent young Soviet citizens to work in industrial projects such as Magnitogorsk, and motivated equally committed young Chinese cadres into remote villages to conduct land reform. Thus each of the totalitarian regimes enjoyed considerable social support, though it fluctuated and diminished over time.

A final comparison between fascist and communist regimes lies in how they ended or were transformed. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, of course, perished in military defeat and conquest amid the devastation of their countries. Having shed their intensely nationalist regimes, Italy and Germany then embraced a kind of “cosmopolitan trans-nationalism"1⁴ as founding members of what later became the European Union. While defeat in the Second World War with its revelations of the Holocaust utterly discredited fascism, victory in that conflict granted to communist regimes in the USSR and China a new source of legitimacy as they added further nationalist and anti-imperialist credentials to their socialist and revolutionary appeal. And those communist societies changed. Contrary to the earlier assumptions that totalitarian regimes were self-perpetuating and lacked the capacity for evolving out of that state, Soviet society after Stalin did in fact discard its more violent and arbitrary features. So too did China after Mao, as a country still governed by a communist party shunned the disruptive upheavals of the Maoist era in favor of stability and economic growth. Furthermore, the world communist movement fragmented as Soviet, Yugoslav, Chinese, and Euro-communist approaches increasingly diverged.

The effective end of communism occurred very differently from that of fascism. Its economic and moral failures had eroded support among both elites and ordinary people while generating movements of reform or outright opposition. In the Soviet case, Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to rescue a failing system in the mid-1980s made everything worse. In the end, even the leader­ship elements had grown so disillusioned that they declined to use the physical forces at their disposal to save the regime from collapse and the country from a negotiated disintegration. In Eastern Europe popular movements forcibly overthrew despised governments in the miracle year of 1989. In China, the communist party, while maintaining its hold on power, abandoned almost everything that had been associated with Maoism and led the country, as Mao had feared, onto the capitalist road amid growing material prosperity. While cultural pressures from the West and Cold War military spending had contributed to the mounting problems of communist regimes, the collapse or abandonment of communism was largely an internal process without the prolonged violence that many had feared and without the external military intervention that accompanied the bloody end of fascism.

What followed in Russia, the former republics of the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China was a prickly nationalism amid growing social inequal­ities. Although long in the making during the communist era, those features of post-communist regimes marked a decisive turning away from the inter­national and egalitarian ideals of their earlier ideologies. Despite remnants of communist rule in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea, communism as a major source of international conflict, as an alternative form of modernity, and as a path to a better world had passed, like fascism before it, into history.

Further reading

Brown, Archie. The Rise and Fall of Communism. New York: Ecco, 2009.

Corner, Paul, ed. Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Furet, Franςois, and Ernst Nolte. Fascism and Communism. Lincoln, ne: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Geyer, Michael, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin, eds. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Neiberg, Michael S., ed. Fascism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

Payne, Stanley. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. Madison, wι: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Priestland, David. The Red Flag: A History of Communism. New York: Grove Press, 2009.