When as a graduate student embarking on dissertation research I arrived in the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s, what struck me was that the mundane but exhilarating reality of the place resembled neither the grim vision of Western theorists of totalitarianism nor the vaunted image of Communist self-congratulators. The schematic, theoretically-informed but empirically-flimsy accounts that passed for science in the Cold War fog—consider anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Gorer’s explanation of Soviet authoritarianism as a product of the swaddling of infants, or the intricate, Talmudic inferences of political scientists that Stalinism was prefigured in the works of Marx or Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?—had prepared neither me nor my cohort of budding scholars for the texture and variety of what was before us. Honest observation was difficult under the circumstances, in part because of the obstacles placed in our way by the Soviet authorities but in even greater part by the hegemony of negative preconceptions that most exchange students brought with them. Confirmation and attribution biases, along with cognitive dissonance, worked their magic on the perception of what we experienced. Only prolonged exposure and recognition of the distance between the everyday and the preconceived began to break through the limits of the prejudgments we had brought with us.

While there was no consensus about the Soviet experience in those years of change and frustration (the 1960s into the 1970s), within the cohort of young Western scholars there was serious questioning of the dominant paradigms then prevalent in Soviet studies. We moved quickly from political to social history, and by focusing on popular forces in the revolution, dismantled the view of the October Revolution as a conspiracy or coup d’état and recognized that Stalinism, as brutal and wasteful as it was, had significant popular support. Political scientists with their on-the-ground experience searched for alternative perspectives to replace the principal lens through which their predecessors had viewed the USSR, namely the totalitarian model that conflated the Soviet experiment with the Nazi regime and predicted similar outcomes in foreign policy and political fate. Our generation tended to be more détentist in its approach to the Soviet Union, and their hopes for easing of East-West tensions appeared vindicated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But with the breakup of the Communist empire the immediacy of experience gave way to a revival of older conceptualizations. Neo-totalitarian hypotheses abounded along with the equation of the Soviets with colonial empires and a post-modernist pessimism about social reform and revolution. The histories of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe remained a subaltern history, dependent on and read through the hegemonic modalities of Western historiography. Historians in those countries, as well as historians of those countries, were expected to read the great historians of the West while they were not required to read us. Subordinated to primarily liberal readings of the past—which look at Russia and the East as places that failed to keep up with the modern, democratic, and the successful civil nation-making of the West—the experiences of the Second World, even as it was dissolved as a separate category, were narrated as stories of failure and collapse.

A quarter-century separates us from the last years of the USSR, and the post-mortems on the legacy of actually-existing socialisms continue to reflect on that central experience of the short twentieth century. How the twentieth century is understood, what meaning is given to the colossal struggle between Communism and Fascism and the resultant triumph—at least for a time—of liberalism, bourgeois democracy, and market capitalism, holds more than academic interest. The meanings that become dominant will inform politicians and journalists, teachers and policymakers, who will use their grasp of the past to plod through the present to acquire some predictability about the future. Three recent accounts by writers from three different disciplines—philosophy (Dominic Losurdo), history (Enzo Traverso), and anthropology (Kristin Ghodsee)—challenge the conventional “we won the Cold War” narratives and go further into a dissection of the particular historical revisionism that has worked to erode the revolutionary tradition of 1789–1991. The Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo proposes to rethink the twentieth century through a counter-history of liberalism that demolishes the privileged place of the West and resets the story in the larger, brutal context of imperialism and colonialism. ^{Footnote 1} “The Twentieth Century,” he summarizes,

Losurdo’s principal target is what he refers to as “historical revisionism,” an interpretation of the twentieth century by such historians as Ernst Nolte and Francois Furet, that “involves the liquidation of the revolutionary tradition from 1789 to the present” by positing a fatal connection from the terror of the French Revolution to Stalinism (p. 5). Rather than a pragmatic if vicious reaction to foreign invasion in the French case or civil war in the Russian, the exercise of state violence against opponents in the revisionist account had an intellectual origin already apparent to Edmund Burke. An “ideological intoxication,” revisionists contend, is common in revolutionary ambitions, movements, and regimes. They threaten civilization, understood to be the capitalist democracies of the advanced industrial states.

As Burke put it, the Left was intoxicated by a universalism that theorized the “supposed rights of man” and “the absolute equality of the human race” (cited on p. 35). Implied within the revolutionary tradition from the eighteenth century to the present was not only the elimination of privilege based on birth but promotion of formal political equality; universal suffrage; abolition of slavery; gender, racial, and ethnic equality; and the end of colonialism. Great statesmen like Winston Churchill, as Losurdo repeatedly points out, understood those implications as soon as they first confronted Bolshevism, which Churchill accused of having “driven man from the civilization of the twentieth century into a condition of barbarism worse than the Stone Age” (cited on p. 57). Lenin was a “phial containing a typhus or cholera culture to the water reservoirs of a big city.” He was, in Churchill’s words, the “high priest and head” of “a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world,” which was committed to “destroy[ing] all the religious faiths and replacing them by the idolatry of ‘the international Soviet of Russian and Polish Jews’” (cited on p. 195).

Historical revisionism in Losurdo’s reading shifted the evaluation of the “Thirty Years’ War” (from roughly 1914 to 1945) from wars and revolutions that were fought to protect and foster democracy, to focus on the shared scourge of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. The partisan blindness of those Losurdo refers to as revisionists leads them to negate the different goals, and concentrate on similar consequences, of the revolutionary tradition and the counter-revolutionary reaction. “Relativization of the horror of the Third Reich occurs through a comparison with the horrors of Stalinist Russia” (pp. 28–29). The October Revolution was constructed by its opponents, and by the revisionists, firstly, not as a genuine revolution but a coup d’état, and more emphatically as an export from Asia designed to undermine European, and by extension, White dominance. It was a small step, Losurdo holds, from the generalized fear of the specter of Communism to the biological racism and anti-Semitism of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, the concept of Judeo-Bolshevism. Losurdo proposes that just as the period 1798–1815 was a time of international civil war between those seeking to prop up the ancien regime and those determined to dismantle it, so “October cannot be separated from the international civil war” that pitted the “two sides engaged in the First World War” and now extended beyond Europe to the colonized world” (p. 89). “The Second World War began as a colonial war (against colonies and the territories which the aggressors intended to convert into colonies). One thinks of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the Japanese conquest of China, and the German invasion (albeit legalized by the Munich treaty) of Czechoslovakia” (p. 104).

These revisionists neglect the colonial and national question and the resistance of colonial peoples to imperial domination, thus making it “impossible to understand the great democratic, emancipatory significance of the Second World War” (p. 115). The most grandiose colonial project in modern history, brought to an ignominious and bloody end by the Red Army, was Hitler’s colossal ambition to ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe of Jews, Slavs, Roma, and others through deportation, enslavement, and mass murder and to settle good Germans in the denuded lands to the east. Hitler proudly identified his plans with the successful removal of native Americans and the enslavement of forcibly imported Africans. Referring to the Untermenschen of Eastern Europe as “Indians,” he singled out the United States as a model of how to make a successful imperial nation-state.

Whereas Bolshevism and the Soviet Union promoted particularistic policies toward ethnic groups, establishing a multinational pseudo-federalist union, the Nazis engaged in “naturalistic de-specification” (what more widely might be called “essentialism”), which took the form of racism, ideas of fixed groups superior and inferior, and underlay the descent into genocide. In Hitler’s mind (and mouth), Jews were the carriers of the virus of Bolshevism, the great racial equalizers, the proponents of anti-colonialism, a people who as early as Paul of Tarsus had incited “slaves of all kinds against the elite, the masters and those in dominant authority. … Everywhere they have stirred up the plebs against the ruling classes. Everywhere they have fostered discontent against the established power. … Everywhere they fan the flames of hatred between peoples of the same blood. It is they who invented class-warfare” (cicted on pp.196-197). ^{Footnote 1} His tirade to his closest associates reminds me of a sign I saw over forty years ago, carried by a small right-wing sect at a counter-protest to a May Day rally in Union Square, New York. It simply and succinctly read: “Karl Marx was a Jew.” And, one might add, a Christian as well.

As I read revisionists like Nolte, Nazism was a reaction to the Bolshevik Red Terror, or more recently Timothy Snyder in his widely-read book Bloodlands, a reaction to the excesses of Stalinism. It appears that what the Communists did first, the Nazis did later. Not only were the two regimes and their genocidal practices comparable, the Soviets had bred their fiercest rivals. Losurdo rejects the comparison and sees it as morally suspect. “The royal road taken by historical revisionism to relativize the horror of the Judeocide is its equation with the ‘political genocide’ or ‘class genocide’ of which the Jacobin-Bolshevik tradition is accused” (p. 199). He argues, not very convincingly, that the collectivization of agriculture was part of a rekindled civil war, a war on peasants certainly, but also directed against an “insurrectionary movement” and partisan struggle. “All this has nothing to do with the bureaucratically administrated genocide of a clearly defined group, whose members had no way out regardless of their actual conduct. Rather, what comes to mind in some ways is colonial warfare” (p. 202). Colonial it may have been, but the agency of peasants under the onslaught of the Communist Party, the army, and allied workers was minimal at most. Losurdo is on somewhat stronger ground when he recognizes that collectivization and the Ukrainian Holodomor that cost the lives of millions were not ethnocides, that is, they were not directed against a specific nationality. But by comparing Stalin’s policies that led to death by starvation to those of the British in Ireland in the 1840s and Bengal in the 1940s, he is making the same kind of decontextualized historical comparisons and relativization of distinct horrific events for which he criticizes the revisionists. He concludes that “international civil war can generate especially bitter conflicts and massacres, but it nevertheless halts at the threshold of genocide in the strict sense” (p. 212). Why? Because, Losurdo claims, the revolutionaries stop short of re-nationalization and re-naturalization of their enemies. The emphasis on class and on the actual practices of individuals and groups, rather than on nations and races, while occasionally breached, was the default position of the Left. ^{Footnote 2}

Losurdo points out that the revisionists’ nostalgia for empire, exemplified most eloquently by Niall Ferguson, reproduces many of the classic dichotomies of Orientalism: the superiority of the West, the inferiority of the others, and the civilizing benefits of “good imperialism.” ^{Footnote 3} A very distorted lens fails to see the original sins of the West, among them the most horrific massacres of colonial peoples, not to mention the economic degradation that accompanied imperial control. Ferguson condemns “bad imperialism,” such as the Japanese invasion and conquest of China, which included the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nanking, but commends the virtues of capitalist imperialism that bring the benefits of market economics and the attendant prosperity. The problem, he feels, is that those who are able to extend the benefits of Western civilization to the benighted Third World, most immediately the United States, are reluctant or embarrassed to do it. “The United States,” Ferguson writes, “has acquired an empire, but Americans themselves lack the imperial cast of mind. They would rather consume than conquer. They would rather build shopping malls than nations” (cited on p. 237). Ferguson sees the Western island of civilization as the last best hope of humanity, conflating as he does the good with the material well-off. He delegitimizes the national liberation struggles of colonial peoples, which, he argues, have brought their post-colonial nations few real benefits, as if anti-colonialist movements can be reduced to rational calculations of economic utilities. In their very structures and the discourses that legitimize them, empires are built and depend on the superiority of some and the subordination of many more, a condition that for many is intolerable. For Ferguson the anti-colonial leaders’ preference in many cases for the Soviets over the West was simply about a grab for power, rather than the attraction of the tradition represented by the October Revolution, which rejected colonial arrogance and racial prejudice.

The theme of an international civil war from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second was already present in the minds of people during the first conflagration. Picked up by such different writers as Isaac Deutscher, Hannah Arendt, and Eric Hobsbawm, it was a central organizing concept for more conservative historians like Nolte and Furet, who opposed Bolshevism and the Soviet experiment. Losurdo’s reappropriation of both the notion of international civil war and another Thirty Years’ Wars is central to the more historically grounded study by Enzo Traverso, who focuses on the conjuncture of wars and revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century. Like Losurdo, he also aims to construct a counter-narrative to the dominant historiography that celebrates liberalism as the principal opponent to fascism, equates Communism with Fascism in a shared totalitarianism, and fails to recognize anti-fascism as a force that saved democracy and capitalism. Traverso borrows the tripartite historical temporality of Fernand Braudel that famously places the “conjuncture” or “cycle” between the great structural shifts of the longue durée and the ephemeral but often decisive contingencies of the “event.” Two earlier historical eras were also Thirty Year European-wide civil wars: the seventeenth-century conflict between Catholics and Protestants that ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the establishment of the principles of modern sovereign states; and the crisis launched by the French Revolution of 1789 that ended with Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 (not quite thirty years) that seriously shook the foundations of the ancien regime and opened the road to an age of liberal and republican states. “The Peace of Westphalia had given birth to absolutism; the Congress of Vienna sealed its demise,” he writes (p. 36). “The first Thirty Years’ War has been understood historically as a decisive step in the process of civilization, the second as the paroxysm of its crisis” (p. 34). Europe and the United States emerged from these two ages of conflict and resolution as a civilization believed by its creators to be set apart and superior to the rest of the world. “In the extra-European space, conceived as a space open to colonization, violence could be deployed without limit or rules” (p. 36). The third Thirty Years’ War, the principal subject of the book, sees a single continuum of violence that includes both world wars, Stalinism, and fascism, and proposes the now familiar thesis that “the massacres that accompanied the history of colonialism provided a model for the total wars of the twentieth century” (p. 70).

Traverso deploys the concept of international civil war as the frame in which he attempts to explain how “the symbiosis between culture, politics, and violence … deeply fashioned the mentalities, ideas, representations, and practices of its actors” (p. 1). The civil war of the third Thirty Years’ War pitted revolution against reaction, the defenders of the Enlightenment against its enemies, and involved both wars between states and wars within states. The Russian Civil War of 1918–1921 included a plurality of conflicts: “a revolutionary war of the Soviet state against an international coalition, a class war between the urban proletariat and the industrial and aristocratic elite, a national war between Russians and non-Russian peoples, and finally a social war between town and country” (p. 50). The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 similarly involved foreign intervention, classes against classes, town against country, reaction again reform and revolution, and the intimate, internal divisions that gave rise to the concept of the “Fifth Column.” The European civil war did not end with the Second World War but continued through the Cold War until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Traveso understands civil war as a radical transformation of warfare between states,

Marked by the “breakdown of order within a state no longer able to impose its monopoly of violence,” civil war “does not aim at a just peace with a legitimate adversary but rather the destruction of the enemy” (pp. 71, 75). In a civil war, Traverso contends, violence “is never purely instrumental. It takes on a strong symbolic dimension, feeds on itself and acquires its own dynamic, eventually becoming an end in itself. In other words, extreme violence converts into cruelty” (p. 86). Law is suspended; charismatic authority reigns; dictatorships are established; and terror is justified as a necessary means to restore the sovereign power of one side over another. “The fascist dictatorship suspended law in order to make the state of exception a permanent norm” (p. 100). The new condition was total war “in which armies destroyed civilian populations and where there are quite simply no longer any rules but that of the complete destruction of the enemy” (p. 167). Expulsion of peoples and genocide became possible, first at Europe’s geographic margins with the Armenians, and then in the continent that declares itself the epicenter of civilization. “The European civil war created a series of conditions without which the Holocaust could have been neither conceived nor perpetrated” (p. 63).

A result of war and civil war in Europe was the rejection by many intellectuals and political actors of the liberal, democratic, and humanist traditions identified with the French Revolution. Goebbels confidently proclaimed that “1789 will be erased from history” (p. 260). Opposed both by the Leninist Left and the fascist and ultranationalist Right, liberal democracy appeared too weak to confront either revolution or what Mussolini characterized as “the “revolution against revolution.” The much-touted Carl Schmitt praised “the suspension of the legal state, accompanied by restrictions on personal freedom and the removal of certain fundamental rights” (p. 238). On the other side of the barricades, Walter Benjamin proposed “the establishment of a ‘real state of emergency,’ the only one capable of waging properly ‘the struggle against Fascism’—in other words, the revolutionary interruption of the course of the world” (p. 245). Leon Trotsky desperately “dissociated Bolshevism from Stalinism, and thus revolutionary violence from the violence of a Thermidorian power that had in his view usurped the revolution,” championing the former of which he had been an author and condemning the latter “in the name of a socialist morality aiming at human liberation” (p. 249).

Rather than condemn those who turned to violence to resist the anti-democratic efforts of both fascism and Stalinism, Traverso defends a politics of commitment that accepts the need for action. “The conservative spirit of our time,” he writes, “presents humanitarianism as the indispensable corollary of liberalism, immunized against ideologies and arising from the ashes of a century of horrors,” without recognizing that violence remains the “midwife” of history (pp. 8–9). He reintegrates the anti-fascist movements into a history from which they have been expunged, where “Oskar Schindler has dethroned Missak Manouchian,” a Communist and principal leader of the Resistance in France (p. 6). “The opposition between fascism and antifascism dominated the political culture of the 1930s and ‘40s, taking the form of a dramatic choice with which Europe was faced.”

In the midst of the life and death struggles of the European civil war, the political engagement of intellectuals on the Left posed particular moral and political choices with which Traverso struggles, having himself grown up in an anti-fascist family that had witnessed the horrors of war and liberation. With the Spanish Civil War, the triangular opposition—fascism, communism, liberalism—was “reduced to a single confrontation between fascism and anti-fascism” (p. 256). For the Right, and in much of present-day historiography, anti-fascism has either been effaced or conflated with Communism. Traverso shows that “far from being a by-product of the Communist parties’ adoption of the Popular Front policy, the anti-fascism of the intellectuals preceded it” (p. 262). Far broader than Leninism or Stalinism, anti-fascism was pacifist and opposed “a certain cosmopolitan spirit to the mysticism of nation and war,” to the magical messiness of nationalism, and held up “the principles of equality, democracy, liberty and citizenship to the reactionary values of authority, hierarchy and race” (p. 203). Anti-fascism, both in culture and the political movements that culminated in the Resistance, “organized and articulated the resistance of the democratic societies of the twentieth century to the advent of the modern dictatorships” (p. 264). But anti-fascists found themselves in a tragic ethical and political embrace with Communists. The Communists were essential to anti-fascism; fascism could not be combatted without them. No “mass mobilization against the Nazi menace would have occurred under the leadership of the old liberal elites. The struggle against fascism needed a hope, a message of universal emancipation, which it seemed at this time could be offered only by the country of the October Revolution” (p. 270). Traverso regrets that anti-fascism did not confront the Soviet regime and in its complacency looked at times at Stalinism with blind admiration. The Left repressed what it was unable to admit.

Forged when the Nazis came to power and consolidated during the Spanish Civil War and in the Resistance of World War II, antifascism was transformed after the war into “a kind of ‘civil religion’ for many democratic regimes that had experience the Resistance.” This, writes Traverso, “now seems a bygone age” (p. 10). “Anti-fascist unity began to break up with the Cold war, the division of Germany in 1949, and ultimately collapsed with the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956. Some anti-fascists chose to remain neutral and not choose between the USSR and the “free world,” but in an ideologically polarized world they soon became politically irrelevant. Liberals donned “the guise of anti-totalitarianism, which meant anti-Communism,” and anti-fascism “was identified in ideological terms with Communism” (p. 271).

One might add (in my own voice rather than Losurdo or Traverso’s) that historians contributed to the selective memory and reshaping of the heroic sacrifices that the Left and the Soviets made to the defeat of fascism. What the USSR and the Soviet people had suffered in the “Second Great Patriotic War” was either marginalized or reinterpreted in a Cold War frame through selection, emphasis, and omission. It is estimated that between twenty-five and twenty-seven million Soviet citizens, soldiers, and civilians died in the war. Yet among the stories repeatedly told was how the Soviets had relativized the Holocaust by attempting to integrate Jewish suffering into Soviet suffering. Stalin and Beria had ordered the killing of twenty-two thousand Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere—which they refused to acknowledge until Gorbachev—and the liberation of Poland was reduced to Stalin’s refusal to aid the Warsaw uprising. The story of millions of Soviet prisoners of war starved to death in Nazi camps, driven to cannibalism, was obliterated for half a century. The rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers fatally tainted the final victory over Germany. Stress on and repetition of Soviet atrocities, which responsible historians would have to acknowledge and relate, colored the Soviet war effort darkly, obscuring the euphoria and camaraderie that accompanied the victory of the Allies. When I visited Auschwitz a decade ago, the Polish guide spoke for forty minutes of Polish suffering before she mentioned the Jews and briskly concluded that the camp was liberated in late January 1945 without referring to who had liberated it. I asked provocatively who in fact had effectively ended the Holocaust. Glaring at me, she answered, “The Red Army,” and moved on.

History is inevitably affected by the present, often more than by the past that historians try so carefully to chronicle. The day that the Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz, January 27, is today commemorated as Holocaust Remembrance Day, yet Vladimir Putin, in the aftermath of his seizure of Crimea, was not invited to the seventieth commemoration of the liberation. The eloquent popular historian of the Soviet-German war, Anthony Beevor, commented in The Guardian on Putin’s absence but noted that “this particular chapter in Russia’s second world war history was, and remains, full of contradictions.” ^{Footnote 4} When Treblinka was liberated, journalists were told not to mention the particular suffering of Jews or the fact that the guards at Treblinka were mostly Ukrainian. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and war correspondents like Vasilii Grossman, who wrote several of the first accounts of the mass murder of Jews, were instructed not to emphasize ethnicity or religion. “‘Do not divide the dead!’ Jews were not to be seen as a special category of suffering. They were to be described only as citizens of the USSR and Poland.” After the prisoners were released from Auschwitz, no news emerged about the camp from the Soviets until five months later. Beevor goes further: “Thus, in a way Stalin was the first Holocaust denier, even if his antisemitism was not quite the same as that of the Nazis. It was probably based more on a xenophobic suspicion of international connections than on racial hatred.” Yes, Stalin’s “antisemitism was not quite the same as that of the Nazis,” but the comparison has been made, and Stalin becomes “in a way” a Holocaust denier even before the Holocaust had been conceived as the Holocaust. Beevor mentions finally that Putin “is a pale imitation of his hero,” Stalin, though he does not go as far as some journalists, and even historians like Timothy Snyder, who equate the Russian president with Hitler. In fact, Putin has been critical of both Lenin and Stalin and appears to admire much more the last competent tsarist prime minister, Petr Stolypin. Yet such facile and unhistorical analogies with destructive tyrants of the twentieth century have become commonplace in the public sphere.

The abuse of historical analogies—like the frequent parallels suggested by the Munich Pact—has had and still has enormous reverberations on states’ policies. Note the way such comparisons have been used in the current crisis over Ukraine. In an especially egregious misuse of history, Snyder equates Putin’s program with Stalin’s actions during the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact period. “Just as Stalin sought to turn the most radical of European forces, Adolf Hitler, against Europe itself, so Putin is allying with his grab bag of anti-European populists, fascists, and separatists. His allies on the far right are precisely the political forces that wish to bring an end to the current European order: the European Union.” ^{Footnote 5} Rather than seeing Stalin’s alliance with Hitler as a tactical maneuver after the West rejected Soviet overtures, an alliance to gain time and delay or prevent a German attack on a vulnerable USSR, Snyder argues that Stalin had similar goals as Hitler and that his alliance made the Holocaust possible. In this formulation Putin is even worse than Stalin, who at least was faced by a real threat from Hitler: “Putin, on the other hand, had no European enemy. Without any apparent cause, in 2013, for the first time, the Russia government designated the European Union as an adversary.” Snyder believes that Russia’s move into Ukraine was a deliberate, unprovoked choice, and he does not consider why Putin would take such a risk or concede that the Kremlin may have feared that NATO might move into Crimea where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is anchored.

While Russian authorities and much of the official media recklessly condemn the Maidan protestors and the Ukrainian government as fascist, Snyder argues that Putin and the Eurasian ideology that he promotes is really inspired by fascist thinkers, like Carl Schmitt or by right-wing Russian writers and philosophers. “The ethnic purification of the communist legacy is precisely the logic of National Bolshevism, which is the foundational ideology of Eurasianism today. Putin himself is an admirer of the philosopher Ivan Ilin, who wanted Russia to be a nationalist dictatorship.” ^{Footnote 6} Snyder’s logic seems to be that quoting Ilin, who reflected a particular strain in Russian thought — a conservative monarchist who believed that democracy was not appropriate for Russia, someone in the Slavophile tradition that held that Russia would travel its own spiritual and political path—is equivalent to being a fascist. For most historians fascism has a limited meaning—the movement and ideology in interwar Europe that saw some nations and races as superior to others and war as a means to imperial aggrandizement. But disregarding the complexities and contradictions of the thoughts of an individual, political activists and polemicists have thrown around the epithet “fascist” or the Hitler label indiscriminately to discredit opponents. Wary of such ahistorical amalgamations of discrete and different events, circumstances, and regimes, I subscribe to the Jon Stewart school of Hitlerology, that is, the only one we should call Hitler is Hitler. ^{Footnote 7}

In the post-war decades, it was difficult to believe in grand narratives infused with an idea of progress after Auschwitz, which Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno saw as the symbol of a “self-destruction of rationalism.” ^{Footnote 8} Traverso writes that “Nazism had already changed the face of the century and the image of man. For [Adorno and Horkheimer], recognition of Auschwitz as a rupture in civilization was indissociable from a radical challenge to the idea of progress. If Nazism had tried to wipe out the legacy of the Enlightenment, it had also to be understood dialectically as a product of civilization itself, with its technical and instrumental rationality now released from an emancipatory aim and reduced to a project of domination” (p. 275). As Stalinism buried the critical potential of Marxism, the remnants of the revolutionary tradition outside the Soviet empire, notably Western intellectual Marxism, gravitated toward the pessimism observed most acutely by Perry Anderson. ^{Footnote 9}

And it is here, with the hopelessness of the aftermath of the Holocaust, that Traverso leaves us.

Kristen Ghodsee begins in a sense with the pessimism with which Traverso leaves off, but she is later inspired by those brave few who took up the struggle with fascism. She starts with her own personal reflection—as many ethnographers do—on how she “accidentally” wrote her most recent book, The Left Side of History. Working on another topic, she was struck as she left the archives by the degree of discontent with and alienation from neo-liberal capitalism (almost invariably conflated with “democracy”) she was observing in Bulgaria, and by extension throughout Eastern Europe. And yet at the same time the resurgent nationalist and xenophobic Right was targeting the Communist and socialist Left and viciously dismantling the Communist past. “Such strident anticommunist rhetoric demonizes anyone who once called himself or herself a “communist” or who believed in the communist ideal. After 1989, in towns and villages across Bulgaria, statues of local heroes who lost their lives fighting against the Nazi-allied Bulgarian government during World War II were defaced and torn down because the people in question had been members of the Communist Party. The thousands of Bulgarian partisans are today remembered as “red scum” (p. xvi). Ghodsee sets out to look afresh at the history of people like Frank Thompson, a British Communist who joined the Bulgarian partisans in 1944 to resist the fascists, and the members of a Bulgarian Communist family, the Lagadinovs, who like Thompson risked their lives for their political hopes. “While I wrote this book,” Ghodsee tells us, “I learned that there were men and women who struggled to make communism a better reality than it came to be in the end. There were dreamers among those whom I had been taught to view as self-serving hypocrites” (p. xx).

Ghodsee’s narrative confirms the contours of anti-fascism laid out by Traverso. Frank Thompson’s younger brother, the important historian E.P. Thompson, made the point in a letter to a boyhood friend of Frank’s, the mathematician Freeman Dyson, that while with the Bulgarian partisans his brother identified himself as an anti-fascist even though he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

“Almost all of these men and women,” Ghodsee goes on to report, “who took to the mountains or risked their lives to smuggle food, medicines, or messages to the partisans, dreamed of a different world. Not all of them were communists—some of them were anarchists, Agrarians, or social democrats—but they all shared the common ideal of a future where workers and peasants would have a greater say in government and a greater portion of the wealth they labored to produce. Frank Thompson, the Lagadinovs, and countless other young idealists across Europe embraced this dream, a dream that gave them courage and hope” (p. 65). And she adds a few pages later, “the partisans were neither heroes nor villains. They were ordinary men and women trying to make a difference in a world turned upside down” (p. 68).

The stories that Ghodsee tells are profoundly sad: the execution of Frank Thompson just a month before the Red Army liberated Bulgaria by a particularly vicious monarchist general, even though he should have been treated as a prisoner of war, not a partisan; the decapitation of Assen Lagadinov, lured into an ambush by Bulgarian gendarmes; and the real betrayal of the innocent hopes of partisans and anti-fascists by the Stalinists who came to power in Eastern Europe. The viciousness of the civil war is modulated with tales of the stunning courage and fortitude of the partisans, hopelessly outnumbered by the Bulgarian army and police, repeatedly betrayed by their peasant neighbors for whom they believed they were fighting, cut down in what at times seemed senseless slaughter but in time would be retold, for a time, as a heroic revolutionary struggle. After learning of Frank’s fate, E.P. Thompson wrote to his father that his brother’s death had not been a waste: “his action was contributing to a great good and lasting enrichment of the life of mankind.” Reflecting back on the sacrifices of Thompson and the Lagadinovs, Ghodsee, however, succumbs to her own pessimism: “Sitting where I was in 2012, I saw very little evidence to show that the early deaths of men like Frank Thompson and Assen Lagadinov had contributed anything to the ‘lasting enrichment of the life of mankind’” (pp. 97, 08).

And yet when she interviewed Elena Lagadinova at age eighty, Ghodsee witnessed the kind of ideal Communist that the self-representation of the party proclaimed. Lagadinova had fled to the mountains at age fourteen after her home had been burnt down by the gendarmes and joined her brothers as a partisan. Under the long-reigning Communist boss Todor Zhivkov, she served in high positions and worked successfully to improve the lives of Bulgarian women, preventing the abolition of abortion and birth control, as had been mandated in Rumania, and promoting day care centers and maternity leave. Bulgaria under Communism became a global model of women’s rights and welfare, only to lose much of those achievements with “the Changes” (promenite), the end of state socialism in 1989. Communism, Elena Lagadinova, told Ghodsee was not about equality; it was about justice. “It was about building a society that would work for the many, rather than enriching the few” (p. 194). Elena waved her arm at the window. “And now you see what we have? So many people are without medicine. So many children are on the street; they are not going to school. Prostitutes make more money than doctors and judges. The young people leave to the West and never come back. People are poorer now than they were before the war, while the rich live in mansions with swimming pools in Boyana and Dragalevtsi. … This is not what we fought for” (pp. 124–125).

In a fascinating chapter on a women’s meeting to write an account of the Communist period, Ghodsee sets out the contrasting perspectives on that complex and troubled experience: the forced modernization; the improvement of the lives of ordinary people; the benefits of the state welfare system; guaranteed work; cheap, state-financed apartments; free university education; the restrictions on intellectual life with the censorship, the imposition of Marxism-Leninism, and the obligatory deference to the Soviet Union; and the show trials and repression of political deviance. A different set of contradictions and contrasts mark the realities of capitalism in post-Communist Bulgaria. A female propagandist, who for nearly a decade wrote about the evils of capitalism but after the Changes was unemployed and in danger of losing her apartment after taking out a home equity loan, tells Ghodsee that “I thought it was all lies. … Can you imagine that all that time I was actually writing the truth?” She sadly concluded, “Communism was like Cassandra. … It told the truth, but it couldn’t change the future because no one believed it” (pp. 150, 154).

Rescuing the fraught history of Communism and anti-fascism in Europe means swimming up a torrential stream of official revisions of the recent past, against new nationalist mythologies touted as authentic histories of the nation; a veritable industry of anti-Communism that includes myriad publications, NGOs, American-funded institutions, and monuments and commemorations to the victims of Communism. Many of those victims were, of course, fascists, anti-Semites who helped orchestrate the Holocaust, and collaborators with the Nazi occupations of Europe. Among those victims were the executioners of Frank Thompson and Assen Lagadinov. The blackwashing of Communism, as Ghodsee puts it, involves a celebration of those who fought to protect the Bulgarian monarchy and its alliance with Hitler. Just as in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and other Eastern European states, an official Communist historical understanding has been replaced, indeed buried, under an official anti-Communist history, and among the victims is historical understanding itself.

Whatever horrors Communism in Eastern Europe brought upon its peoples, however many victims of repression, censorship, and restricted lives there were, the worst excesses of Stalinism lay further back in the past, in the collectivization of Soviet peasants; the Ukrainian Holodomor; the deportations and execution of hundreds of thousands of kulaks, non-Russian nationalities, and innocent victims of the Great Terror. The victory in the World War cost tens of millions dead, countless wounded, ruined lives, and as decisive as it was in the destruction of fascism, those sacrifices would not erase the pointless, unwarranted crimes committed in the name of enforced progress. Eastern Europe suffered under Soviet and Communist rule even as society was propelled into a rough modernity, industrialized, urbanized, and educated until the domination by an aging pseudo-socialist apparatus made no sense. When Gorbachev lifted the heavy hand of the Soviet army and police that in the last instance protected Eastern European Communism, the regimes fell one by one in rapid succession.

As our authors demonstrate, for those who embraced its positive meaning, socialism was a utopia—not in the sense of an unattainable goal but rather in the sense of a direction toward which people might work to realize their political desires. That political goal, whether it could have actually been reached or not, was the empowerment of all the people, social justice and equality (not only of opportunity as liberals believe, but of reward as much as is practically possible). Even in our current dystopian moment socialism stands opposed to the proposition so central to classical liberal (now conservative) economic ideology that individual greed will magically produce the greatest good for the greatest number and that capitalism is the end of history. Moreover, by resurrecting a politics aimed at the common good, socialism—in contrast to liberalism but closer to some forms of conservatism, religion, and nationalism—seeks a restoration of social solidarity fractured by the individualizing effects of competitive market relations. That utopia remains a telos for socialist politics.

Historians and other scholars also operate in a utopian context. As a discipline, history provides what knowledge we can have about how the present was made and what human beings might or might not do in the future. It contributes both to how we understand what nations and societies are and to the intellectual constitution of our imagination of political communities, which could not exist without the narratives that make up national and social histories. Even as historians seek to render an objective understanding of the past and propose a critique of what they consider to be “mythological” formulations, they are forced to accept that they, too, are products of historical pasts and historically constituted presents. The dilemma of the historian or social scientist is nicely stated by Traverso using Gramsci’s concepts of organic and traditional intellectuals: “An intellectual (and so also a historian) ‘organically’ tied to a class, a minority, a group or a party, risks forgetting the critical autonomy essential to his profession. On the other hand, I do not believe either in the definition of the historian, above all the historian of the present age, as observer above the fray. In order to exercise his craft, he must be capable of assuming a certain critical distance; but he must also be aware of what ties him to the object of his research, which always includes a measure of ‘transfer’—a measure of subjectivity that refracts the events of the past like a prism and orients his gaze” (pp. 18–19). The educator was educated somewhere at some time. Accuracy and balance may be the closest we can come to objectivity and neutrality. Yet none of us is without political commitments; some of us are more engaged than others; but those commitments and engagements can contribute to the seriousness with which we do history or political science.

After a quarter century of Western triumphalism preening that capitalism and democracy had won the Cold War, and socialism had been discarded on the trash heap of history, Losordo, Traverso, and Ghodsee present “the Left side of history” to recover the original humanism that inspired so many anti-fascists and to bring a modicum of balance to the historiography dominant both in the West and the former Communist states. They are convinced that politics, ethics, and commitment to visions of the future can inform, even inspire, good social science. Objectivity and neutrality vis-à-vis Communism may be elusive, perhaps even impossible, but balance, nuance, and recognition of contradictions, complexities, and anomalies are essential first steps to honest historical reconstructions and the science of politics. This does not mean, however, that historians need not feel outrage at the inhumanities that marked the last century or give up optimistically seeking alternatives to modernity’s dark side. It may not be fatalistically true that those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, but certainly ignorance of history makes it easier, and more likely that uninformed choices will open the way to error. Or as Samantha Bee put it: “As they say, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, or, more likely, … just plain doomed.” ^{Footnote 10}