ABSTRACT
Though terror in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia both resulted in many millions of victims, their memories are different. The popular memory of the Holocaust boomed in the last years of the twentieth century on an industrial scale, but the popular memory of the Soviet terror has not advanced much since the 1960s. The debate over the relationship between German Nazism and Soviet Communism has been a long and fierce one. Hannah Arendt’s Cold-War era concept of totalitarianism, positing a metaphorical ‘common denominator’ shared by the two regimes, was largely rejected by Western academics from the 1960s to the 1980s, later embraced enthusiastically in Russia during the Gorbachev era and has been largely resurrected in the Western scholarship of the new century. However, many Western thinkers, from Freud to Habermas and Derrida, have emphatically rejected the notion that these two regimes should be viewed as symmetrical. 1 Their methods may have been similar, but their purposes were fundamentally different, they say. The Soviet project was at least congruent with the Enlightenment tradition and based on admirable ideals. Historians have often challenged this philosophical argument: from Ernst Nolte who launched the German ‘Historians’ Dispute’ in 1986 to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (2010), historians demonstrate the comparable scale and mutual dependency of the lethal policies pursued by the Soviet and Nazi regimes.
