Hitler and Stalin: who was worse?

Here's an interesting post from Castrovalva:

The subject of comparing fascism and communism is a fairly well-trodden one in these days, and there are comparatively few willing to advance the old position that communism could claim some form of superiority to fascism. Needless to add, Slavoj Zizek is one of that few:

"Stalinism hasn't been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews.
We do not find in Nazism any equivalent to the dissident Communists who risked their lives fighting what they perceived as the 'bureaucratic deformation' of socialism in the USSR and its empire: there was no one in Nazi Germany who advocated 'Nazism with a human face'. Herein lies the flaw (and the bias) of all attempts, such as that of the conservative historian Ernst Nolte, to adopt a neutral position, i.e. to ask why we don't apply the same standards to the Communists as we apply to the Nazis."

To some extent these observations seem somewhat besides the point; there is no denying that communism has tended to be seen as at best a lesser of two evils (in spite of the greater scale of Stalin's crimes and the more arbitrary nature of his terror; we perhaps shouldn't mention that Stalin did indeed persecute the Jews in much the same way as the Nazi regime) and at worst as something whose crimes can be exculpated in relation to its more congenial ends. One cannot, after all, make an omelette without breaking eggs. Nor is the Enlightenment heritage of communism in question; but if the deeply embedded romanticism of Western culture that led to Nazism can be called into question in the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wagner, it is difficult to see why the same cannot be said for our enlightenment heritage also (indeed the work of Zygmunt Bauman seeks to do precisely that).

The genuine question is whether the lack of perceived equivalence between them is defendable. For myself, the answer remains that it is not. Where Germany (or at least its Western regions) thoroughly confronted the atrocities of the old regime, the same cannot be said for Russia. Anne Applebaum provides a good description of the consequences of this divergence:

"The result: half a century after the end of World War II, the Germans still conduct regular public disputes about victims' compensation, about memorials, about new interpretations of Nazi history, even about whether a younger generation of Germans ought to go on shouldering the burden of guilt about the crimes of the Nazis. Half a century after Stalin's death, there were no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia because the memory of the past was not a living part of the public discourse ...
In a very deep sense, some of the ideology of the Gulag also survives in the attitudes and worldview of the new Russian elite. The old Stalinist division between categories of humanity, between the all-powerful elite and the worthless 'enemies,' lives on in the new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens. Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia's citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today's northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running.
Tragically, Russia's lack of interest in its past has deprived the Russians of heroes, as well as villains. The names of those who secretly opposed Stalin, however ineffectively, ought to be as widely known in Russia as are, in Germany, the names of the participants in the plot to kill Hitler. The incredibly rich body of Russian survivors' literature -- tales of people whose humanity triumphed over the horrifying conditions of the Soviet concentration camps -- should be better read, better known, more frequently quoted. If schoolchildren knew these heroes and their stories better, they would find something to be proud of even in Russia's Soviet past, aside from imperial and military triumphs."

HOW come Germany has turned out to be the one nation to confront its horrific past? Japan hasn't. Is China facing Mao's fuckups? It's great that the popularity of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions has made countries like Chile, Argentinia and South Africa deal honestly with their pasts and enabled them to move on. Russia is basically fucked. They've always had a terrible elite, from their 19th century Czars to their Communist Czars. Putin is just the latest in a roll-call of dictatorial shitheads. Their leaders have always lied to their people. Gorbachev was a shining exception: maybe that's why the Russians detest their only truth-teller so much these days. Let's hope our own leaders return to some tradition of honesty. The lies and spin of the Bush Administration show how far we've strayed from our own tradition of fairly honest, accountable leadership.