CAN WE CHANCE THE ANALOGY?

Thus the Leninist and Stalinist trajectory of the Soviet regime manifested sociopo­litical ingredients that are all too familiar to specialists of the Iberian Ancien Re­gime empires: slave labor as an indispensable mode of production; an ideology of work as both educational and redemptive; a desire to identify and neutralize mi­norities that were considered dangerous; repressive practices grounded on a certain kind of theory of the intergenerational transmission of criminality, sinfulness or bad origins; anti-Semitism that was capable of uncovering the Jewish identity of as­similated Jews; the implementation of a program of ethnic cleansing; the lasting coexistence in the same society of free and unfree citizens; projects for the liquida­tion of collective categories that did not deserve to survive the historical process that was underway; and all of this within the framework of the construction of a multi-cultural empire, heir to a colonial empire.

Therefore despite some political similarities, the Leninist-Stalinist system of re­pression was not founded on a racial theory of alterity, or on the identification of racial threats to society. Contemporary nation-states can produce sophisticated cat­egories for classifying their population as a function of their diversity; a repressive apparatus can target individuals who are innocent of any crime for the simple fact of belonging to a persecuted category. To select their victims, NKVD agents did not need any theory of the intergenerational transmission of social or moral traits through bodily fluids or tissues. A foundational antinomy ran through the Soviet regime. As Amir Weiner has shown, what is striking is the contrast between the idea that society is destined to undergo radical transformations (in the sense of universal emancipa­tion) and the conviction that individuals and groups are incapable of change:

The view of society as a malleable construct went hand in hand with a continuous purifi­cation campaign seeking to eliminate divisive and obstructing elements.

The Christian victory in the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, in conjunction with mari­time expansion and missionary activity, had contributed to the creation of a political horizon for universal transformation. But this goal ran into a rather similar obstacle: the suspicion that infidelity persisted underneath the appearance of conversion and that despite evangelical efforts, alterity remained intact.^[410] This is the same political system that was simultaneously pushing back the last vestiges of Iberian Islam, prosecuting Jews who had converted to Christianity, and crushing the Amerindian populations.^[411] Our detour into the historiography of the Leninist-Stalinist regime allows us to confirm the idea that racial politics can be instituted in ideological and political contexts that are not founded on the racist impulse. It is the very same an­tinomic nature of racial logic with regards to the most essential ideological founda­tions of these regimes that offers the most interesting perspective. Evangelical uni­versalism has not always known how to counter suspicion of the sincerity of its converts, or how to prevent the success of polygenist positions, or how to relegate the myth of Ham to the level of an exegetic contradiction.^[412] The promise of univer­sal emancipation, as formulated by scientific socialism, was unable to eliminate anti-Semitism, or rein in Russo-centric imperialism, or reject ancestral beliefs in the natural transmission of moral traits. The political regimes that used these great dog­matic constructions for support also implemented institutional practices and norms that were contrary to these very same dogmas. The example of racial reasoning of­fers us a test case of the depth of these antinomies. In return, the trans-historical comparison of cases allows us to study racial politics outside of the overly strict circle of contemporary regimes whose backbone was an integrally racialized con­ception of politics and society: the United States under Jim Crow, the Third Reich, Apartheid South Africa. For these there was no such antinomy.