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The National Interest
Judging Nazism and Communism
by Martin Malia
. . . It should be transparent to any neutral observer that we are not dealing here with rival emphases in social history but with a sectarian dispute between two species of ideologues: neo-Bukharinists and para-Stalinists. Indeed, Western revisionism overall developed within what was basically a Soviet, or at least a Marxist, perspective. Putting matters this bluntly, however, was until recently impossible in academic discourse, especially in America. Down through the failure of Gorbachev's perestroika, any allusion to these obvious facts was met with protestation from the revisionists that they were not Marxists but merely positivists whose "social science", unlike that of the Cold War "totalitarians", was a strictly non-political, "value-free" enterprise. Or they might revert to the countercharge of "McCarthyism."
But bluntness is presently a therapeutic necessity; for, though the time is long past when the revisionist master narrative was plausible, the time has not arrived when this is adequately reflected in the historiography. Where now are revisionism's "conquests"? October as a "social revolution" rather than a Party coup d'état? The "Bukharin alternative" of market socialism as true Marxism-Leninism? The "Cultural Revolution" of 1928-32 as the democratic crowning of the Soviet edifice? All are no more than fantasy chapters of an epic culminating in a socialism that turned out to be a mirage. All the same, though revisionism itself ended along with the Soviet regime, the revisionists themselves are still in place, and the debris of their narrative still frames our historical discourse and furnishes the basis for our comparisons with Nazism. Since the parties concerned will not say this, it is necessary to say it in their stead. If they protest their positivist purity, this should carry no more weight than David Irving's protestations that he is not anti-Semitic or partial to Nazism. . . .