ABSTRACT
Nazism developed in part in opposition to Communism while Communism's primary defining adversary was always claimed to be "fascism"; and in this interlocking relationship the two went to Armageddon together in the most traumatic moment of the century. When modern war actually came a second time it confirmed the 1930s' prior judgment, first of all in the collusion between the two chief dictators in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939. Even more important, however, was the revelation of the Nazi death camps, which made it starkly clear that modern "dictatorship" was an unprecedented phenomenon in world politics. Outside the Russian matrix, variations in the Leninist formula are even more notable. The Soviets' postwar "outer empire" in Eastern Europe was significantly different from the "inner empire" of the USSR itself. After the war, however, the two historiographies diverged, with that of Nazism emerging as by far the more complex and variegated.
