SOURCE: "On the Crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler," in Partisan Review, Vol. LVIII, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 78-87.

In the following essay, Abel rejects Marxism and national socialism as the moral doctrines they were purported to be by their adherents and focuses the blame for crimes and brutality committed for these causes on those who, Abel believes, mistakenly held them up as rooted in morality.

In the late summer of 1945, I took issue with James Burnham (in Dwight Macdonald's Politics) for having maintained earlier that year (in the January issue of Partisan Review) that Stalin was the logical and appropriate successor to Lenin in the Communist hierarchy. A Marxist—and much more long-winded—argument to the same effect was given during the seventies by Jean-Paul Sartre (in the second volume of his Critique de la raison dialectique). Here Sartre tried to show that Stalin was chosen to be...